Software watermarking scheme based on multivariate public key cryptosystem

Software watermarking is an efficient tool to verify the copyright of software. Public key cryptosystem-based watermarking is widely researched. However, the popular public key cryptosystem is not secure under quantum algorithm. This paper proposes a novel software watermarking scheme based on multivariate public key cryptosystem. The copyright information generated by copyright holder is transformed into copyright numbers using multivariate quadratic polynomial equations inspired by multivariate public key cryptosystem (MPKC). Every polynomial is embedded into the host program independently. Based on the security performance of MPKC, the robustness and invisibility of the proposed scheme is significantly improved in comparison with the RSA-based watermarking method.