Textbook cryptography can work in many cases, such as email encryption. But for software protection, theory is not enough – why is that? The author of an email is self-motivated (or not) to preserve the secrecy of his message. By contrast, the user of a software application is mostly interested in the application working seamlessly. Having a properly protected application or preserving security measures are far from his top priority. He is not above deception and disguise if it means fiddling with the system in order to reach his purpose: perfect convenience for himself as the user in the best case, piracy in less honorable cases.

In this context, the use of traps, especially in connection with an irreversible locking of the cryptographic key, proves extremely effective. You may be familiar with spy movies, where devices self-destruct after delivering a message. In software protection, the destruction sequence starts when a trap is triggered. Typically, an end customer uses the software without realizing that traps are even present. A hacker, instead, will trigger them in his attempt to reverse engineer the software.

This masterclass is going to classify the attack methods used by hackers and explore effective ways to safeguard ISVs against them. After outlining the concepts, we will give a live demonstration of  how to integrate traps in your application. With AxProtector .NET, integration is carried out automatically for you. If you prefer pulling the strings yourself or if you are dealing with a native application to protect, AxProtector .NET or AxProtector provide all the necessary freedom. During our time together, we will see both the manual and the automatic options.

Here are the main topics we are going to delve into:

• Typical attack methods of hackers
• Dynamic code analysis
• Static code analysis
• The concept of traps
• Definition of traps
• Secret messages to the dongle
• How traps are triggered
• Integration in .NET applications
• Fully automated with AxProtector .NET
• Manually in the source code
• Integration in a native Windows application
• Manually in the source code
• Simulated triggering of a lock

Make the hackers’ mission impossible: Plant perfectly crafted mines in the code, and let them work for you.