A Survey of Feature Extraction Techniques to Detect the Theft of Windows Applications

Abstract

As software industry has been grown, it occurs more frequently to illegally copy software or to steal the core modules of a program. In order to detect program plagiarism, similarity analysis of suspicious programs based on source codes is one of accurate methods. However, the source codes are not always available. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze and determine software piracy or theft with only binary executables that are release versions of their products. In this paper, we propose a method to extract the feature information from the binary codes of the executable files on MS Windows systems in order to determine whether software is pirated or core modules of a program are stolen. We perform a small experiment to detect program similarity and plagiarism by comparing the statically extracted features of target programs.