Patent ID: 8307450

Claim:
A method of hiding information of a secret message in an instruction processing pipeline of a computer program for an entity comprising: receiving said information from said entity; identifying a stall at a location in the instruction processing pipeline in said computer program by performing data dependency analysis on said computer program which comprises: scanning said location of said stall to find at least one no-operation instruction as already part of said computer program, the at least one no-operation instruction being already part of said computer program prior to said identifying said stall and prior to said scanning said location of said stall; in response to finding the at least one no-operation instruction as already part of said computer program in said stall in the instruction pipeline, replacing the at least one no-operation instruction being already part of said computer program in said stall with an instruction, said instruction encoding said information and not altering the functionality of said computer program; and returning said computer program containing said instruction to said entity which includes said secret message encoded in said stall.