Intelligent guard: a novel approach toward software protection

Abstract

Developing a software product is an extremely big deal, and can be a huge investment of cost and time. So, software piracy protection is a main concern of software-development companies. This paper presents an intelligent protection system, through using an intelligent guard delivered with the software . The guard itself is protected by a one-time-use key that resides on a USB device, and observes the environment to see whether there are suspicious operations like debugging. To get information about suspicious operations, it relies on the OS. Upon finding one or more such operations, the guard will send a signal to the software, which makes it to call disposer functions. To prevent the possibility of code reverse engineering, the program in IL, is saved encrypted, and is decrypted prior to every execution. All these operations are managed by the guard. To install and execute the software, the guard must be installed, in advance. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.