Smartmark: Software Watermarking Scheme for Smart Contracts

A smart contract is a self-executing program on a blockchain to ensure an immutable and transparent agreement without the involvement of intermediaries. Despite its growing popularity for many blockchain platforms like Ethereum, no technical means is available even when a smart contract requires to be protected from being copied. One promising direction to claim a software ownership is software watermarking. However, applying existing software watermarking techniques is challenging because of the unique properties of a smart contract, such as a code size constraint, non-free execution cost, and no support for dynamic allocation under a virtual machine environment. This paper introduces a novel software watermarking scheme, dubbed Smartmark, aiming to protect the ownership of a smart contract against a pirate activity. Smartmark builds the control flow graph of a target contract runtime bytecode, and locates a collection of bytes that are randomly elected for representing a watermark. We implement a full-fledged prototype for Ethereum, applying Smartmark to 27,824 unique smart contract bytecodes. Our empirical results demonstrate that Smartmark can effectively embed a watermark into a smart contract and verify its presence, meeting the requirements of credibility and imperceptibility while incurring an acceptable performance degradation. Besides, our security analysis shows that Smartmark is resilient against viable watermarking corruption attacks; e.g., a large number of dummy opcodes are needed to disable a watermark effectively, resulting in producing an illegitimate smart contract clone that is not economical.