SaTC: CORE: Small: Collaborative: Evaluating Performance and Security of Executable Steganography for Surreptitious Programs

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Intellectual property protection of software remains a priority for the commercial sector because counterfeiting and piracy erode profits and market share, ultimately causing impacts on companies, consumers and governments. Watermarking for proving digital ownership and obfuscation for hindering adversarial reverse engineering are currently used to provide some level of deterrence against this. This project will investigate novel methods of software protection, hiding executable programs within other executable code.Proposed research will investigate the use of "executable steganography" as a possible anti-reverse engineering technique and a way to watermark software. The goal of this research is to produce viable methods for hiding executable code, expanding the state-of-the-art for this style of program protection, while also characterizing its effectiveness based on capacity, robustness, detectability, invisibility, and resilience. Both University of Nebraska Omaha and University of South Alabama bring key opportunities for broader impacts of this research. Both have a rich tradition of meeting the needs of diverse student bodies, both are in Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) states, with numerous students coming from rural areas. Both universities have extensive K-12 STEM outreach and Scholarship for Service students preparing for future cybersecurity careers. The research teams will directly engage students in the research as part of their academic programs via course projects, senior capstone exercises, and labs. The data for this project will not contain any personal or sensitive information other than the algorithms developed. Other researchers will have access to any databases and the source code via individual requests to the PIs. Research papers and published conference papers, etc. will be available via the project web page: http://loki.ist.unomaha.edu/~wmahoney/ExecutableSteganography/index.html.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.