Software protection

Abstract

With the rapid growth of applications development, software piracy became a major concern for software developers. Business software alliance organization (1) estimated that 35% of worldwide soft wares were pirated in 2004, which caused a loss of nearly $29 billion. Pirates use reverse engineering and de-compilation techniques to steal software. Software piracy involves stealing others algorithmic secrets, to decrease the effort spent on production time which allows them to gain an advantage in the market competition. To help developers protect their software from piracy, or reclaim the ownership of their pirated software, software protection techniques were introduced. Software protection techniques can be classified as hardware-based or software-based approaches. In this paper, we are going to focus on software-based protection techniques, such as watermarking, code obfuscation and tamper proofing. Unfortunately software protection didn’t receive that much attention in the research community and most of research in that field were directed towards java programs. Our main contribution in this paper is to survey existing software protection techniques and study their impact when we apply them to C# programs.