V.i. Labs Software Protection Blog

Secure Offshore Development

Diana Kelley from Burton Group recently published a great article on what you should consider when outsourcing. She mentions application outsourcing. Normally organizations use NDA and threat of sudits to secure their code when outsourcing. From a security perspective there are ways to enhance protection of your organization’s IP resident within software when using off shore development resources. Rather then just providing source code, you could distribute the really sensitive components in complied form and still allow development around these. Of course if the risk of piracy or competitor access to code is high then software protection technology can be utilized to reduce these risks.

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New Piracy Threat Assessment and Prevention Service

After much preparation and due diligence, we just announced a new partnership with a very cool company, Internet Crimes Group (ICG). ICG was the only partner we could find that could penetrate and gather intelligence on the cracking community in conjunction with our customer’s use of CodeArmor. Bob McMillan of IDG News Service wrote his view of us combining our technology with ICG services here: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyId=17&articleId=9016798&intsrc=hm_topic

The other benefit of ICG services is that will enable our internal security team to validate and continually enhance our countermeasures against reverse engineering. Specifically, the new tools and techniques being leveraged by crack teams to disable license enforcement and software protection. And prominent analyst groups such as Burton, IDC, Gartner, EMA and Forrester all agree that the need and market for anti-piracy and reverse engineering solution is rapidly gaining momentum.

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China and software copyright protection

Interesting trend in China, according to this article (http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=355407&ssid=54&sid=BUS article below)

“Record applications registered for software copyright protection Zee News - Noida,India Beijing, Feb 20: China, known for rampant piracy, received over 22, 400 applications, a record, for software copyright protection last year”

The article leads you to believe this is an indication of improving IP protection, but it strikes me as evidence for why software vendors should worry when selling into China. How many how many of the 22, 400 apps were based on existing on other software IP.

Vic

Piracy Amnesty Program

Interesting discussion on the value of an amnesty program to deter software piracy (http://www.makeshitbreakshit.com/2007/03/28/software-piracy-amnesty-day/). It would need to consider how software vendors who sell high value software applications could realize additional revenue from such a program, especially in countries like China.

Vic