One of the biggest problems facing companies operating within the provision of software products is blatant theft. Each year, thousands of cases arise where a company’s flagship service-based or software products have been compromised by hackers attempting to steal source code in order to make a quick buck.
For software companies, seeking methods to protect their bottom-lines is a high priority, and there are several software encryption services on the market. While these are created for a range of technologies, components, and methodologies to provide varying levels of protection, some are good, some are not so good, some are great and virtually unbreakable.
If you’re a software engineer or part of a team designing a product that relies on software, the potential devastation caused by stolen source code cannot be underestimated.
Here are three of the market’s best solutions for battling theft and reverse engineering.
Blurry Box by Wibu-Systems
Blurry Box is built on the principle that the necessary effort required to attack and copy a piece of software’s code should be greater than the effort to rebuild and rewrite that software from scratch.
Blurry Box integrates AxProtector, a solution that encrypts compiled software files automatically and shields against reverse engineering. It also incorporates IxProtector, a solution that extracts individual functions, encrypts them, and only decrypts when called by the software. It also duplicates, modifies, and encrypts individual functions.
This combination of AxProtector and IxProtector is supplemented by several other cryptography methods that each increase the effort required to copy the software. These create a strong safeguard makes it more efficient and simplifies the task of completely re-developing the protected software.
Software Protection by PELock
PELock protects your software’s source code from theft and tampering using anti-cracking and anti-debugging techniques.
This software protection is founded on the primary cryptography methods of obfuscation and polymorphic encryption. These shield a piece of software’s source code and specific code fragments, such as core functions, from decompilation and reverse engineering.
Combined with the Poly Polymorphic Engine, PELock further secures source code by using an entirely different encryption algorithm at random each time the encryption process is executed.
EnScryption Inc.
EnScryption offers a vast range of source code encryption solutions tailor-made for interpreted language scripts – such as Shell, Perl, Ruby, Python, NodeJS and CLI PHP – which run on physical machines.
For quick, simple, and safe automated encryption of a script’s source code that protects it from prying eyes, EnScryption is all you need. Now, obviously, you shouldn’t be using this basic level of encryption to protect an entire software suite or commercial product, but it is perfect if you want to only allow certain people to utilize your scripts or only let them run when pre-defined conditions are met.
One example of utilizing EnScryption is if you regularly employ the services of temporary contractors.
Image courtesy of Jon Moore on Unsplash.
Which Should I Use?
Ideally, I would recommend Blurry Box by Wibu-Systems if you are wanting to completely lock down your source code. It is so secure that even hackers invited to break into it for a cash reward couldn’t do it. All three software protection products featured here, however, do a great job of shielding source code from attackers with a range of protective services.
