Tamper detection marking for object files

Much of present day computer software is highly mobile, with a great amount of software being delivered to a client host via a network shortly before execution begins. The integrity of mobile code is one important aspect for the secure execution of the code on the client host. We describe a cryptographic-steganographic approach to embedding authentication data within executable object files. Our approach simplifies management of and requires no additional bandwidth to accommodate the authentication data. Initial experimental results show no runtime performance degradation for the execution of the protected program.