HIKOS - Highly Secure, Intelligent Software Copy-Protection

Abstract

Software piracy, which includes reproducing and distributing software products illegaly and without authorization, continues to cause financial losses to software vendors. Dongles for hardware protection have been present for a while now, but unfortunately, most of these solutions were only effective for a short period, until these methods were circumvented and time has showed that solutions that offer full protection from this phenomenon are impossible. In this project, we focus on a hardware copy protection scheme based on dongles and we take the current state-of-the-art in this area to a higher level. We provide a Highly Secure Software Copy Protection scheme and our contribution consists of the ability of the dongle to execute a selected part of the software inside the trusted environment in a dongle. This way, an attacker will never have the full software available on the host, which makes reverse-engineering of it more difficult. Additionaly, I provide a threat model and security analysis for this mechanism. Finally, I attach parts of some algorithms I created for the Code Preprocessing, Analysis and Extraction.