Software piracy prevention through diversity

Abstract

Software piracy is a major concern for software providers, despite the many defense mechanisms that have been proposed to prevent it. This paper identifies the fundamental weaknesses of existing approaches, resulting from the static nature of defense and the impossibility to prevent the duplication of digital data. A new scheme is presented that enables a more dynamic nature of defense and makes it harder to create an additional, equally useful copy. Furthermore it enables a fine-grained control over the distributed software. Its strength is based on diversity: each installed copy is unique and updates are tailored to work for one installed copy only.