A study of software protection techniques

Abstract

Software piracy and tampering is a well known threat the world is faced with. There have been a lot of attempts to protect software from reverse engineering and tampering. It appears as if there is an ongoing war between software developers and crackers, both parties want to get an upper hand over each other as the time passes. Some of the ample techniques of software protection are reviewed, including multi-block hashing scheme, hardware based solutions, checksums, obfuscation, guards, software aging, cryptographic techniques and watermarking. All of these techniques play their parts imparted on them to protect the software from malicious attacks. © 2007 Springer.