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Summary

A small Russian IT company, specialized in the development of high-performance graphics software, has created a software tool for protecting high-tech industrial software with secret algorithms against analysis and reconstruction of algorithms. The application is extremely resistant to hacking; it can run together with other code-protection software. The company is looking for a partner for technical cooperation on testing and final tuning of this technology.

Full description

Tools for protecting software from analysis and reengineering differ strongly from common tools for protection from unauthorized use and copying. The peculiarity of reengineering protectors is that it is not the binary code itself to be protected, but the coded algorithm itself, which is a much more complicated task.
Usually, the code protection from reengineering is implemented by the developers themselves at the level of source code, and the protection measures are inserted at the compilation stage. However, this practice significantly increases the development cost, since the protection algorithms themselves are comparable in complexity with very non-trivial applications. A more economical solution would be to modify the binary code of the application with a special software tool (protector) after the development, in order to make the code more resistant to reengineering attempts. Such protector can be purchased once and used multiple times for developing numerous applications.
The company developed an industrial prototype of a protection system (Protector) for program code defense from reverse engineering attempts. The Protector receives at the input an arbitrary compiled Windows or Linux application with certain code fragments marked by the developer. Then Protector produces the same program with the marked fragments of binary code modified so as to make algorithm reconstruction by reengineering efforts extremely difficult.
The prototype exceeds the known analogs in complexity of protecting the virtual machine from reverse engineering.
The company is looking for a partner with significant experience in code-protection software development for thorough testing and cooperative final tuning of this technology making it ready for the market.

Innovative Aspects

The protection system is based on a virtual machine. A unique feature of this protection is that in consecutive runs the protected program code uses different paths. It makes reengineering with use of debugging systems extremely difficult.
The developed protection system works extremely well against reverse engineering attempts, exceedeng all known world analogous software. It can also be used together with other types of protection software.

Partner expertise sought:

- Type of partner sought: IT industry.

- Specific area of activity of the partner: IT developer or IT publisher company, data protection.

- Task to be performed by the partner sought: Thorough testing and cooperative final tuning of the technology to the market needs. Search for new applications.