Protecting software with a code mutator

Question

This question has been asked before: Have you ever used code virtualization or vmprotect to protect against reverse engineering?

But, since I am 4 years old, I felt that it would be good to ask a similar question again, since, probably, the situation has changed a lot since then.

We look at protecting our software from crackers with software such as VMProtect .

What we would like to know are the disadvantages of using software such as VMProtect? Is this popular software and it suffers from many false positives with antivirus? What else should we consider? Are there more popular alternatives or studies comparing them?

Answer 1

Yes, new things have happened since then.

Many new Anti-temper software tools have appeared on the market, each of which has its own technique. some like Arxan and whiteCryption ...

There is also a new system of protection against dope, which, apparently, is almost impossible to reverse.

VMProtect seems to create a virtual processor and run its own encrypted code there, it probably has a huge performance loss if performance, which is not critical to your code, ignores this.

So, you have many options, but remember that each protection program is the same in this case: they cannot be rebuilt, so you can’t only relay to the protection system to protect your software, some good practices for protecting your software are:

• Do not use the idea of ​​“30 days of trial”, if you want to give a free sample, do a demo where important functions are not compiled with it.
• Encrypt the software, make sure that only the one who bought it has a key to decrypt it.
• Do not allow anyone to freely download the full software, even if it is encrypted, make sure that only the client can download it.
• Put the watermarks on the code, mainly the customer information inside the software so that you can find out where the leak came from.
• Make the software tied to the specific computer on which it was installed (some anti-tempers can do this)

Some disadvantages of using Anti-tamper to protect your software:

• Loss of performance (some technologies only harm performance that are not related to important functions).
• Increasing the size of the executable file.
• Increased memory usage.
• And others that may be specific to a particular program.