CURBING SOFTWARE PIRACY IN DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT USING CODE SPLITTING, OBFUSCATION AND FINGERPRINTING TECHNIQUES
Abstract
Software Piracy has become a major problem for businesses and its widespread in many parts of the  world  leads  to  financial  losses  and  harm  to  consumers.  These  problems  caused  the deployment of many security techniques to control piracy. A lot of researches have been done on software security techniques but unfortunately protecting software source code in development environment has been a challenge for software companies as software source codes are not yet transformed  to  unreadable  codes.  Therefore,  software  piracy  emanating  from  development environments,  mostly by insiders,  has  been  a  big  problem  to  tackle  because  the  prevalent software protection techniques were primarily developed for use at production stage. Based on the literature review, no research was found on piracy reduction in development environment. In this  research  work  an  architecture  has  been  proposed  and  implemented  based  on  design obfuscation that enables tracking pirated standalone software at development stage using the hardware and software aspects, online or offline, and tracing vulnerable PCs within a company. Code Splitting, obfuscation and fingerprinting techniques were used to design the proposed architecture. Two examination results processing software: ExamsLOGIC 2.0 and ELogicPLUS were used to test the proposed architecture for existing and new applications respectively. The result was compared with the result of the reviewed work and found to be improved. For both the two applications, it was found that the proposed architecture is feasible and effective.
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
Software Piracy is the unauthorized use, distribution or copying of software illegally. It has become a major problem for businesses and it’s widespread in many parts of the world leads to financial losses and harm to consumers (Rouse, 2005). The Business Software Alliance (BSA) and the Software Publishers Association (SPA) are organizations meant for reducing piracy worldwide. The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is the leading advocate for the global software industry before governments and in the international marketplace. It is an association of nearly 100 world-class companies that invest billions of dollars annually to create software solutions that spark the economy and improve modern life (BSA, 2011) . These organizations estimated that there are two-third illegal copies of software available for every legal copy of software sold and had piracy rates of 62 percent or higher (BSA, 2011). The 2010 BSA/IDC study demonstrates that even a modest reduction in software theft would have significant multiplier effects on the economic contribution of the packaged software industry. This makes software piracy a major problem for the software industries and to the world economy in general.
Software industries always strongly depend on copyrights and other Intellectual Property (IP) to drive innovation and ensure a return on investment in R&D. Hence, protecting their products from being pirated is one of the major tasks they consider in order to keep the company up and running. With the improvement in technology over decades, software vulnerabilities such
as Reverse Engineering increase at almost the same pace with technology. For almost every software protection technique there is an equivalent hacking technique for it.
In  the  case  of  packaged  software,  it  is  common  to  find  counterfeit  copies  of  CDs incorporating the software programs, as well as related packaging, manuals, license agreements, labels,  registration cards and security features.   Counterfeiting is  a serious  problem  for the software industry, as advances in technology have enabled a growing number and variety of commercial  enterprises  to  manufacture  and  distribute  counterfeit  software  on  a  massive scale. This is because the risks of being caught are relatively low and penalties are far less than for engaging in other illegal activities (BSA, 2011).
Besides, Software Piracy also serves as one of the major ways of distributing worms by hackers. Although some consumers may think they are getting a great deal when they obtain pirated software, it is more likely they will receive a substandard product with hidden cyber security threats. The fact is that using illegal software puts consumers’ personal information, financial  security,  and  even  reputation  at  risk.  At  the  very  least,  it  can  lead  to  software incompatibility and viruses, drive up maintenance costs, and leave consumers without technical support or security updates.
It is common for sites that offer access to pirated software and piracy‐related tools to distribute  malicious  code  that  damage  IT  security  and  performance.  Indeed,  a  significant percentage  of  counterfeit  software  or  key  generators  downloaded  from  P2P  sites  contains malicious or unwanted code.  In an IDC study, research revealed that one in four websites that offered pirated software or counterfeit activation keys attempt to install infectious computer code, like Trojan horses and key loggers, on test computers. The study found that 59% of counterfeit  software  or  key  generators  downloaded  from  P2P  sites  contained  malicious  or unwanted  code. A  subsequent  study  by  Harrison  Group  Inc.  found  that  companies  using unlicensed or counterfeit software were over 70% more likely to have critical computer failures lasting 24 hours or more and/or experience the loss or damage of sensitive data (BSA, 2011).
These are some of the problems that urge companies to devise and improve ways of protecting their products from reverse engineering, counterfeiting, and intellectual theft. Some of the  adopted  standard  methods  for  protecting  software  are  Code  Obfuscation,  Software Tamperproofing, Software Birthmarking, Software fingerprinting and watermarking (Collberg and Thomborson, 2002).
In this research, controlling software piracy in the development environment is the major task to be accomplished.
1.2 Problem Statement
Source codes of a software company are available on the developers’ computer whereby maintenances and updates are done. At this level, software and developers’ PCs are vulnerable to attacks and piracy to claim ownership or use as worm distributors. Hence, preventing the source codes at this stage is a challenge to companies. Also, tracing the code owner’s pirated copy within the firm becomes a hectic task.
1.3 Research Motivation
In a company where the source codes of their software product are available on their developers’ system, what are the protective measures to be taken to protect the source codes from being pirated? How can a software company trace and validate its pirated software code that is in use without totally obfuscating the source code?
* MSC COMP. SCI.