Software Birthmark Design and Estimation: A Systematic Literature Review

The concept of software birthmark is developed for the detection of theft and piracy in software applications. The originality of software can be evaluated by comparing software programs on the basis of their birthmarks. A number of birthmark designs have been proposed which are used to specify birthmark for source code and executable code related to particular programming languages. This study presents a systematic literature review on available software birthmark designs and related techniques for comparing birthmarks in order to identify pirated software. This research is focused on identifying different applications of software birthmark, especially the estimation of software birthmark to identify the extent of piracy performed in a software. The objective is to gain insight into complex details of software birthmark by accumulating and analyzing the knowledge provided in the literature in order to facilitate further research in software birthmark and its applications. The study is conducted by following the systematic literature review protocol. The data are collected from primary studies published from 1992 to April 2018 in specified journals and conference/workshop proceedings. A total of 143 primary studies are selected, based on predefined exclusion, inclusion, and quality criteria. The research identifies 22 software birthmark techniques frequently used and discussed by researchers and industry. The study also identifies a number of important applications of software birthmarks. These applications define the use of software birthmark in software theft and plagiarism detection, intellectual software asset management, detecting binary theft, malware detection, detecting the theft of natural language, and semantics-based repackaging detection for mobile apps. The results show that despite the large-scale research and development of different birthmark techniques, there is a lack of organized knowledge which is needed to facilitate the usage of software birthmark for critical applications like clone detection and malware detection. Furthermore, it is seen that the area of software birthmark estimation is not well researched which needs to be explored further. The study recommends that the area of software birthmark needs to be explored for developing a reliable and authentic mechanism which can accurately and easily detect software theft and ultimately prevent the piracy of software.