Posts Tagged: "CodeSuite"

Software Forensics: Objectively Proving Infringement or Misappropriation

Software forensics is the examination of software for producing results in court. The objective of software forensics is to find evidence for a legal proceeding by examining the literal expression and the functionality of software. Software forensics requires a knowledge of the software, often including things such as the programming language in which it’s written, its functionality, the system on which it’s intended to run, the devices that the software controls, and the processor that’s executing the code. Whereas a digital forensics examiner may attempt to locate files or sections of files that are identical, a software forensics examiner must look at code that has similar functionality even though the exact representation might be different.

Bob Zeidman

October 27, 2014

The Software IP Detective: Infringement Detection in a Nutshell

When copying has occurred, much of the code may have changed by the time it’s examined due to the normal development process or to disguise the copying. For example identifiers may have been renamed, code reordered, instructions replaced with similar instructions, and so forth. However, perhaps one comment remains the same and it’s an unusual comment. Or a small sequence of critical instructions is identical. Correlation is designed to produce a relatively high value based on that comment or that sequence, to direct the detective toward that similarity. If correlation were simply a percentage of copied lines, the number could be small and thus missed entirely among the noise of normal similarities that occur in all programs.

Bob Zeidman

November 20, 2011