Abstract
Software piracy is a major economic problem: it leads to revenue losses, it favors big software houses that are less hurt by these losses and it prevents new software economy models where small enterprises can sell software on a per-usage basis. Proprietary algorithms are currently hard to protect, both at the technical as well as the legal level. In this paper we show how encrypted programs can be used to achieve protection of algorithms against disclosure. Moreover, using this approach we describe a protocol that ensures - under reasonable conditions - that only licensed users are able to obtain the cleartext output of the program. This protocol also allows to charge clients on a per-usage basis.
These results are applied to a special class of functions for which we obtain a secure and computationally feasible solution: the key point is to encrypt functions such that they remain executable. We further show how to robustly fingerprint the resulting programs. Our approach is fully software based and does not rely on tamper resistant hardware.
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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Sander, T., Tschudin, C.F. (1998). On Software Protection via Function Hiding. In: Aucsmith, D. (eds) Information Hiding. IH 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1525. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49380-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49380-8_9
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