| Live Webinar and Demo: Protecting Applications with CodeArmor - March 25, 2008 |
| Tuesday, March 25, 2008
2:00 PM Eastern/11:00 AM Pacific
Releasing native Windows and Microsoft .NET applications comes with the threat of software piracy, code theft and tampering. New protection technologies and approaches are available to combat these threats and protect your software intellectual property and source code.
In this webinar, V.i. Labs will provide an overview of the threats and risk factors driving the need for protection, review the pros and cons of available software protection approaches, and present a live demonstration on how to protect applications using V.i. Labs CodeArmor.
Attend this live demo and see how you can:
- Prevent .NET decompilers from recovering representations of source code
- Embed monitoring and encryption capabilities within existing applications without requiring source code modifications or additional application files
- Create a secure environment to control access to decrypted software
- Verify and protect application and system DLLs at run-time
- Employ comprehensive secure execution monitoring and advanced anti-debugging capabilities to prevent applications from being analyzed at run-time
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| A Layered Approach to Software Protection |
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Software protection should be thought of as a way to deter or mitigate risk and not as an absolute security. In the diagram above, the level of protection is shown as a layered approach: as the threat increases additional layers of protection are needed to combat the threats.
The level of expertise of the individual or organization attempting to reverse engineer an application plays a critical role in this relationship.
- A novice could be deterred simply by using license management technology.
- A "Script Kiddie" who has enough skill to use common reverse engineering tools and to understand existing reverse engineering tutorials could defeat a license enforcement system (but may be deterred by using obfuscation).
- An expert level reverse engineer is someone who can reverse engineer an application, but is also able to create tools (such as unpackers and debugger extensions) that enable less experienced individuals to replicate an attack. An example of this dynamic is the wide use of rogue license key generators.
As both the threats and the expertise of the attacker increase, additional layers of software protection are needed.
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| Posts From the V.i. Labs Software Protection Blog |
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SIIA's Anti-piracy division 2007 year in review report lists the top pirated software titles. They include some of the most popular and used software in both the consumer and business space. If I exclude Adobe Creative Suite and AutoCAD, the software prices average out to $88 per user (using Google pricing searches). I believe many of these titles can remove themselves from this list by adopting a SaaS model. Given their price point and popularity I believe these vendors could see significant drop in piracy by lowering the dependence of revenue based on software installs and generating more of their revenue from online subscriptions and services.
Vendors of higher value software (like EDA, CAE, and other specialized engineering software) have less of an opportunity to do this since their software must often operate offline and most of their functionally is in place within their client software. These vendors have and will continue to fight piracy with legal and software protection strategies.
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