Integration of Software Protection Mechanisms against Reverse Engineering Attacks

Abstract

Nowadays software piracy is considered as one of the most serious security problems on computers. We compare and evaluate major software protection mechanisms, which show that each method has unique protection coverage. From this observation, we believe that integration is one the most effective ways to have wide coverage since unlike other ordinary integrations of diverse techniques, integration of anti-reverse engineering mechanisms is very easy due to small dependency while providing high flexibility. For validation, we implemented major anti-reverse engineering mechanisms and 2 integrated schemes. In our implementation, integrated schemes have low interference and wide coverage. To evaluate additional overheads due to integration, we evaluate code sizes and execution times, which shows that additional overhead for integration is almost negligible.