Surreptitious software: Models from Biology and History

Over the last decade a bewildering array of techniques have been proposed to protect software from piracy, malicious reverse engineering, and tampering. While we can broadly classify these techniques as obfuscation, watermarking/fingerprinting, birthmarking, and tamperproofing there is a need for a more constructive taxonomy. In this paper we present a model of Surreptitious Software techniques inspired by defense mechanisms found in other areas: we will look at the way humans have historically protected themselves from each other and from the elements, how plants and animals have evolved to protect themselves from predators, and how secure software systems have been architected to protect against malicious attacks. In this model we identify a set of primitives which underlie many protection schemes. We propose that these primitives can be used to characterize existing techniques and can be combined to construct novel schemes which address a specific set of protective requirements.