Surreptitious Software

Preface

Surreptitious software is the term we have chosen to describe a new branch of computer security research that has emerged over the last decade. It’s a field that borrows techniques not only from computer security, but also from many other areas of computer science, such as cryptography, steganography, media watermarking, software metrics, reverse engineering, and compiler optimization. Surreptitious software applies these techniques in order to solve very different problems: It is concerned with protecting the secrets contained within computer programs. We use the word secrets loosely, but the techniques we present in this book (code obfuscation, software watermarking and fingerprinting, tamperproofing, and birthmarking) are typically ...