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Other software protectors and licensing system have important vulnerabilities, which prevent them from being a perfect solution to protect an application against reverse engineering or cracking. The following section identifies some of those vulnerabilities and shows how Themida resolves them.

 

Obsolete protection techniques

 

Most modern software protection systems use already broken techniques that are quite easy to bypass. Normally, an attacker will reuse the same proven tools that have been used over years to break protection systems. Often the attacker will release a global technique to attack every application protected by a specific protection system.

 

SecureEngine® uses new technology in software protection to ensure each protected application is unique thus preventing any cracking tool from being used to create a universal crack to your application.

 

 

Attackers are one step ahead of the protection system

 

When a software protection system has been broken, their authors implement patches to avoid a specific attack from being used again on new versions. Typically attackers will inspect the new changes that have been applied in the new version and will easily bypass them again. In this common scenario, attackers are always one step ahead from the protection system because the new applied patches can easily be identified and defeated.

 

SecureEngine® has a different approach to avoid this. If vulnerability is found the vulnerable object is quickly changed (due to the mutable technology used in SecureEngine) instead of releasing a patch against the specific threat. The new object, joined with the rest of the SecureEngine® objects, creates a completely new protection system. The benefits of this, when compared to common software protectors, is that attackers will have to reexamine the whole protection code to bypass the new changes.