Re: Request: tamper-proofing executables

[rarachel@prism.poly.edu (Arsen Ray Arachelian)]

> The neatest trick I heard of was to use the 68000's single step mode
> to decrypt each word of the program on the fly, run it, then write it back
> reencrypted under another key, so that a decrypted copy never existed in 
> memory, and what was there was a moving target.  Unfortunately, the decrypting 
> software did sit in memory, and so you could eventually hack that right out,
> and decode the core image.

This is as useful as writing your own PCode interpreter and encrypting the
PCode as it runs.  Whoop de doo. :-)  You can still get at the actual
interpreter and copy it along with the key and along with the code it is
executing it.  It's a simple thing.  Capture it in memory, save the memory
image to the disk, write some code to reload it, and restart it again.

There's no way to do this securely without hardware.  Optionally if you had
smart drives, that is disk drives with their own CPU and RAM, you could
make it very hard to defeat this by loading a program in the drive's CPU
which would run in sync with the actual program and spit out consecutive
encrypted sequences or issue challenge numbers and check them against the
previous number.  This makes it hard because now you have to hack two
devices.  Offers more protection than a single program doing this, but it
is still not foolproof.

The best thing to do is to build a custom CPU with custom RAM and seal it in
some epoxy with self destructive materials in it.  This is excruciatingly
cumbersome, and you have to deal with the problem of heat dissipation. (Since
the CPU is a custom made one, you can't simulate it or break it.  Since you
have no access to RAM, you can get RAM images, etc.)

Another alternative is to use a hardware key generator dongle.  But if the
hacker finds the algorithm and the key for this device, and it can be done
by probing it, he can simulate it in software.  Fer instance, if the program
accesses it via the operating system instead of direct I/O on the CPU, a
routine can be written to emulate this box in software.  For protected mode
CPU's with virtual ports, even doing direct I/O will fail....

There's always a way around everything but the most excruciatingly painful
schemes...

At best you can devfeat mediocre hackers and viruses attempting to screw with
your code...
At worst you can have lots of headaches trying to implement an overly secure
system when it isn't always called for.

Unless your program is some super duper new tech thing and you don't want
people to disassemble and reverse engineer it, don't bother with anything
more than a simple CRC and a bit of encryption...