Low Cost Cryptographic Coprocessing (LC^3) For Software Protection

As the dependence on more complex and powerful software constantly grows, so does the need to protect that software from tampering and reverse engineering. A major problem of securing software is the challenge of staying one step ahead of the attacker by developing new technologies that defeat the efforts of available reverse engineering tools. Recently software protection mechanisms have evolved at a faster rate than the computers on which they run, and as a result the protection often comes with greatly decreased performance. The computer industry is constantly looking for new ways to improve performance and enhance the user experience. In modern systems, more processing power is being added to traditionally less sophisticated IO components. Of these components, the video card in particular is interesting because the video card manufacturers have provided developers a standard interface to enable customized, sophisticated graphics processing to be executed directly on the video card. This proposal introduces the innovative concept of using the programmable graphics processor on a video card as a low cost, widely available cryptographic coprocessor for the purpose of efficient software protection.