Protecting your software from reverse engineering

[Mark Dalgarno]

A rather mundane but important question, how do you protect your software from reverse engineering? Or do you feel it's not worth doing?

Are you a SaaS provider and if so how do you stop people reverse engineering your application from the client-side if at all?

Do you use any tools to help you (e.g. obfusticators)?

What would it cost you if your application was reverse-engineered?

[Hugo]

I think one should take some steps to prevent this. One very important reason I think, is that is shows good stewardship. One needs to consider how potential investors view the company if it pays no attention to protecting its IP.

One must be able to explain to a potential investor why certain IP decisions have been made, else that investor may consider the management to be careless with vital assets.

Of course it is a cost/benefit trade off as are many things, but at least one should be able to show why certain decisions have been made, even of one has selected minimal protection.

With .Net it has become a major concern, we use {SmartAssembly} to obfuscate our mamnaged code but also have some vital core logic coded in unmanaged C and C++, this means that it is a doubly complex task to try and exploit any of our code.

One needs to make life as hard as possible for competitors, we have invested thousands of hours devsiing algorithms and fathoming out obscure OS and .Net behavior in order to get our required functionality, a competitor must not be able to see how we did this or that.

They too need to spend as much time and effort, and this is off putting to them.

Hugo