MetaSPD: Metamorphic analysis for automatic Software Piracy Detection

This paper presents a novel approach to address the problem of automatic detection of the software that is pirated. Software piracy, which is the unauthorized reconstruction and distribution of licensed and copyrighted software, imposes high economical and commercial losses annually and is also considered as a drastic threat to the security of software systems. To overcome these issues, we mine the opcode graphs of the software to extract the frequent opcode sub-graphs of the software. In fact, these sub-graphs would act as micro-signatures of the original software and can be used to reason about the pirated versions of the software. Pirated software detection shares many characteristics of metamorphic malware detection where the structure of the code is morphed while the main functionality of the malware is preserved. We evaluated our approach using the same data and experimental setup as a state-of-the-art approach. In our experiments, the proposed approach outperformed the mentioned approach in terms of robustness and effectiveness.