Software Situational Awareness for End-node Authentication

The foundation of software protection is built around guarding against reverse engineering, tampering, privacy/theft, and unauthorized execution. One means of preventing a malicious attack is to use software-hardware locking to “bind” an application to a specific computer or set of computers so it cannot be used on an unauthorized system. Pikewerks believes it has uncovered new methodologies to relate an application to its approved host system(s) that could strengthen security. As part of this effort, Pikewerks will examine current binding research and couple that with its own unique solutions to create and test new and innovative approaches. One proposed solution will look at weighted system/environmental attributes. Pikewerks will also examine history-based protection mechanisms to determine if a program is running on the correct platform by looking at residual information. The output of the research and analysis will be a prototype capable of differentiating between a valid and an unauthorized host and that can apply penalties in the case of malicious intent.