Wu and Alumni Swaminathan and Mao Awarded Patent for Data Hiding

Prof. Min Wu (ECE/UMIACS) and her former students, ECE alumni Ashwin Swaminathan and Yinian Mao are co-inventors of U.S. Patent 7,840,789, "Data Hiding in Compiled Program Binaries for Supplementing Computer Functionality." The patent was issued on Nov. 23, 2010.

In the invention, bit reductions in program instructions are achieved by determining the set of bit patterns in bit locations of the instructions. If only a subset of bit patterns is present in the instructions, they may be represented by an index value having a smaller number of bits. The index value may be substituted into the instruction and later used in decoding by referencing a corresponding bit pattern in a lookup table. The bit-reduction in the instruction makes way for supplemental data bits which may then be embedded.

For more information, please visit the U.S. patent website.

Published December 6, 2010