NISLVMP: Improved Virtual Machine-Based Software Protection

Abstract

The VM (Virtual Machine)-based software protection technique provides an effective solution to protect software, making it extremely difficult to analyze and crack. This technique has become the research focus of software protection. In this paper, we introduce the general design ideas of this technique. However, there exist some vulnerabilities in the design. We introduce these vulnerabilities in detail and come up with some improvements to mitigate them. We design and develop a VM-based protection system, named NISLVMP, and carry out some experiments with it. The results show that the improvements are effective.