Protecting Android applications with steganography-based software watermarking

In this paper, we propose a steganography-based software watermarking scheme to protect Android applications from software piracy. Considering the resource limitations in mobile devices, it is difficult to apply previous software watermarking schemes in mobile applications. To decrease the watermarking overhead in a watermarking scheme, such as a slowdown in the execution of applications after embedding a watermark, we proposed a different approach that applies steganography-based techniques in software watermarking. The proposed scheme embeds watermarks by reordering the sequence of instructions in the basic blocks in Dalvik executable files.