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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 WinLicense 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.

 

 

Static trial and licensing control

 

Most of the other trial systems do not include a wide range of APIs to interact with the licensing system or to check and extend the current status of the trial period in a protected application. This makes developers narrow their creativity to create a flexible trial/licensing system for their customers and forces them to use a rigid registration system for their application.

 

WinLicense comes with an extensive SDK to satisfy developers' needs, giving developers the freedom to hande all those situations that they want and leaving to WinLicense the hard work of those situations not handled by the developer.

 

 

Trial periods are easy to reset by attackers

 

Most of the current licensing systems store the current trial status (days left, executions left, etc.) in places which are easy to find by attackers. Normally, the trial information is stored in the Windows registry and/or files. In this scenario, an attacker will use specific tools to compare the registry/files before and after executing a protected application. This shows them where the trial information is stored in the system and therefore, how to reset the trial period for an application.

 

WinLicense comes with the Trial Storing Manager which is a specialized technology to store the trial information of a protected application in random and special locations in the system. This makes the trial period of protected applications very difficult to reset.