A Fragile Software Watermarking Algorithm for Software Configuration Management

A new fragile watermarking algorithm for software configuration management is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the program (cover work) is divided into N groups, and hash function is used respectively to obtain the whole program information. Secondly, the watermark is obtained by combining with program information, author information and time information. The software version index (similar to software version number) is created through the watermark information. Thirdly, the watermark is embedded into the first and last lines of the program simultaneously, and then watermarked program is obtained. The frangibility of watermark is used to identify the variation of the software, and the index based on the watermark is taken as the software release identification and version retrieval basis. Not only can the algorithm be used to solve the defects and problems of traditional software configuration management, but also it can be applied in software tamper-proofing and content authentication etc.