Highly Efficient Virtualized Execution

Software continues to grow more complex over time, and our reliance on software continues to grow. As such, security engineers are under more pressure to protect the secrets held in software than ever. A popular technique used by security engineers to protect their applications is to use in-process virtual machines to force the attacker to understand and reverse engineer undocumented instruction sets before attacking the application itself. This has been successful in increasing the skill set, time, and resources necessary to reverse engineer these applications, but this protection incurs a high performance penalty - often orders of magnitude slower performance than the unprotected application. This renders many applications unsuitable to this type of protection. What is needed is a software protection framework that provides all the advantages of in-process virtual machines while still operating efficiently. This document proposes continued development of the proof-of-concept software protection framework presented in Phase I that has shown that software protected with our novel virtual machine technologies can operate at 10 percent of the efficiency of the original application while still providing significant protection. The document describes the effort required to build a robust and extendable framework based on this research.