Software Piracy Protection

Unauthorized copying of software (colloquially known as piracy) is considered an important issue for today's software industry. A typical end-user license agreement (EULA) usually grants the customer only the right to use the software, not redistribute or share it. However, the easiness with which software can be copied and problems with enforcement make piracy tempting. According to Business Software Alliance (a well-known anti-piracy group representing interests of some of the largest software makers), the commercial value of pirated software put into the market in 2009 totalled $51.4 billion. Though illegal in most countries, unauthorized copying of software nevertheless remains widespread. The same BSA study estimates annual increase in worldwide piracy rate to be approx. 40%; this is attributed mostly to the fast growth rate of the world's software markets, especially in the BRIC countries.

Because of the above, many commercial software vendors turn to some form of copy protection for their product. Popular forms of copy protection include registration keys, online product activation, hardware solutions and various cryptographic techniques. Most of them have a fundamental flaw, though: they can be bypassed. Selectively allowing reading, but not copying is fundamentally abhorrent to the nature of digital information. Even purpose-built hardware is not an answer to the problem - history shows that it is forbiddingly difficult to make such a solution absolutely secure. It is important to note that this doesn't make copy protection useless - even if total prevention of copying is unachievable, it is possible to delay the appearance of pirated copies.

And this is where Morpher comes in. It provides code obfuscation - a form of program transformation that makes code more difficult to understand and change. The distinguishing feature of Morpher is integration with the source language compiler, which allows to employ particularly powerful algorithms. Obfuscation makes circumvention of a traditional protection scheme significantly more challenging. As before, it won't make the code safe forever (which is impossible), but will help to slow down the attackers. And in most cases this is really all that is needed - slowing down attackers enough to make the time and effort investment required to bypass the protection impractical.