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How Can Software be Protected from Piracy ?

posted by janrinok on Friday March 21 2014, @10:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the questions-without-answers dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"Echoing a question asked on programmers.stackexchange.com - How can software be protected from piracy ?

It just seems a little hard to believe that with all of our technological advances and the billions of dollars spent on engineering the most unbelievable and mind-blowing software, we still have no other means of protecting against piracy than a "serial number/activation key." I'm sure a ton of money, maybe even billions, went into creating Windows 7 or Office and even Snow Leopard, yet I can get it for free in less than 20 minutes. Same for all of Adobe's products, which are probably the easiest. Can there exist a fool-proof and hack-proof method of protecting your software against piracy? If not realistically, could it be theoretically possible? Or no matter what mechanisms these companies deploy, can hackers always find a way around it ?"

 
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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday March 22 2014, @05:15AM

    by sjames (2882) on Saturday March 22 2014, @05:15AM (#19647)
    The problem is intractable. It's my machine (or virtual machine). I can make your software see anything I want it to see through virtualization. I can patch it as I see fit. Meanwhile, there has to be some set of conditions that cause it to run or your legitimate customers couldn't run it.

    The closest you can get is to have a server that the software depends on. That might fly for games (though you will lose some of your customers), but not for an OS or many other apps. Even that isn't imposssible to overcome but it raises the bar.

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