A comprehensive Software Copy Protection and Digital Rights Management platform

Abstract

This article proposes a Powerful and Flexible System for Software Copy Protection (SCP) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) standards. Software protection is achieved through a multi-phase methodology with both static and dynamic processing of the executable file. The system defeats most of the attacks and cracking techniques and makes sure that the protected software is never in a flat form, with a suitable portion of it always being encrypted during execution. A novel performance-tuning algorithm is proposed to lower the overhead of the protection process to its minimum depending on the software dynamic execution behavior. All system calls to access resources and objects such as files, and input/output devices are intercepted and encapsulated with secure rights management code to enforce the required license model. The system can be integrated with hardware authentication techniques (like dongles), and to Internet based activation and DRM servers over the cloud. The system is flexible to apply any model of licensing including state-based license such as expiration dates and number of trials. The usage of a standard markup language (XrML) to describe the license makes it easier to apply new licensing operations like re-sale and content rental.