SPOT - Software Protection and Obfuscation Toolset

The DoD and commercial software companies have made significant investment in software. In the DoD context, these high value applications provide significant technological advantage over our adversaries. It is of paramount importance to protect these applications from reverse engineering, theft or other malicious tampering. We propose a hybridized system called Software Protection and Obfuscation Toolset (SPOT), which provides multiple layers of defense against malicious reverse engineering attacks. The techniques proposed in SPOT provide defenses against both static and dynamic analysis of application binaries. This hybridized approach consisting of code obfuscation, encryption and tamper-proofing will provide an effective deterrent against reverse engineering attacks. Applications protected by the SPOT system can be deployed in hostile environments where the host and the user cannot be trusted. We expect this product to be a major component of the "third leg" to the information assurance triad, namely, the application-centric approach to protecting important DoD software. Our past experience in commercializing SBIR projects, and the experience gained from designing and implementing SPOT will help us to release a commercially viable product in Phase III.