Innovative Reverse Engineering Protection for Software

"The Tamper Resistant Software (TRS) technology is a technologythat transforms a given computer program into a formthat is difficult to understand and thus to modify.In theory, it is impossible for a piece of softwareto be completely tamper proof. However, the goal ofthe TRS technology is to deter the potential crackersto the extent that either the required cracking effort is too excessiveor the gain is not worth the effort.Obviously the degree of tamper resistance depends on thephysical rsource available to the attackers. The TRS technologydesigned to fend off state-backed attackers is among themost challenging and is the focus of this research project.We propose to carry out a comprehensive attack analysis onexisting software-based TRS technologies, deduce a set ofguiding design principles from such an analysis, developa set of new program transformation techniques that couldfurther strengthen software/intellectual property protection,and implement a selective subset of these proposed techniquesto gauge their effectiveness, implementation complexityand practical feasibility. There are two commercial endeavors that could potentially benefitgreatly from the research and development of the TRS program transformationtechnology described in this project. First, digital content management (DRM) systemscan greatly benefit from the software protection provided by the TRS technology,because it can prevent users from tampering and thusbypassi