How to protect against reverse engineering?

[mshahbazi]

We are in the final phases of releasing a product. I was wondering what software tools available or anyone have experience with in order no to let someone hack the software or reverse engineer the EXE and DLL's.

Thanks

Mike

[RatherGolf]

It's a pretty fair bet that you can't complete protect programs for reverse engineering. At best
you can only slow them down.

[R.D. Holland]

First thing you do is copyright your code and file formats and patent any software or processes you created that can be patented.

The second thing you do is kill all the competition's lawyers.

Anything that is engineered, can be reverse engineered.

[G Squared]

Ok, I really dont know alot, but If I were going to reverse engineer stuff, I would run the program and notice static text that would probably be near the code Im looking for, instead of trying to decompile the whole program, i would use a hex editor to find that static text in the program. A solution to this is creating the text with an algorithm, instead of storing a static string in the program. Or along the same lines, you could put a relatively simple encrytion on the text. Now, dont count on this to be the best way, the only way, or even a good way to slow reverse engineering. But it may help.
~G²

http://www.gotoworld.com/getpaid/def...rid=1010538733

[chafey]

There is now way to prevent people from reverse engineering your code. The best you can do is make it harder for them. You may want to spend some time reading the various hacking/cracking pages on the web. Knowing the tools and methods crackers use to get into your program is the first step to beefing up the security on your application.

Chris Hafey

[G Squared]

In fact I ran across a program right after I posted it called AsPack. This little program takes all win32 exe's and compresses them up to 70%. It decompresses in memory every time it runs, and is actually faster because of less HD access. At the same time, the compression gives some protection against reverse engineering. It is a valuable little program and I think that It requires no royalties to use. Check it out at www.entechtaiwan.com/aspack.htm

~G²

[Rail Jon Rogut]

I'll just chime in with the rest and say that you can't beat someone who has the right tools like SoftIce, etc... Check out this site http://www.faizal.com/singapura-mirr...avia/index.htm and get an idea of what you'll be up against.

Rail

Recording Engineer/Software Developer
Rail Jon Rogut Software
railro@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~railro/

[Sam Hobbs]

I do not know how fancy the decompile software and such is but my guess is that if you compile your software with something like VC it will probably be too much work to reverse engineer. There are exceptions but generally speaking you probably have many other things to worry about.

If it is especially unique software, then you might want to do the patent stuff but that generally applies to algorithms not entire applications.

[herbieII]

Ever see the movie "Short Circuit"? please don't "disassemble me". If someone can write a program that can't be disassembled, I'd like to see it.

Roger L. McElfresh