V.i. Labs Software Protection Blog

Combating piracy by lowering software prices?

SIIA’s Anti-piracy division 2007 year in review report lists the top pirated software titles. They include some of the most popular and used software in both the consumer and business space. If I exclude Adobe Creative Suite and AutoCAD, the software prices average out to $88 per user (using Google pricing searches- see below). I believe many these titles can remove themselves from this list by adopting a SaaS model. Given their price point and popularity I believe these vendors could see significant drop in piracy by lowering the dependence of revenue based on software installs and generating more their revenue from online subscriptions and services.  Vendors of higher value software (like EDA, CAE, and other specialized engineering software) have less of an opportunity to do this since their software must often operate offline and most of their functionally is in place with their client software. These vendors have and will continue to fight piracy with legal and software protection strategies.

2007 Software Titles Most Frequently Pirated By Companies 
Symantec Norton Anti-Virus  $20
Adobe Acrobat    $88
Symantec PC Anywhere  $199
Adobe PhotoShop   $289
Autodesk AutoCAD   $1,700
Adobe DreamWeaver  $298
Roxio Easy CD/DVD Creator $24
Roxio Toast Titanium   $49
Ipswitch WS_FTP   $89
Nero Ultra Edition   $89
McAfee Virus Scan   $65
McAfee Internet Security Suite $65
Intuit TurboTax   $40
Intuit Quicken Home & Business $60
Symantec Norton Ghost   $65
Adobe Creative Suite   $2,000

Average price Without Autodesk AutoCAD and Adobe Creative Suite = $88

China's anti-piracy efforts

After reading this recent article on the success of China's anti-piracy efforts, I realized how difficult it will be for specialized or high value software vendors to see the same gains. The article describes how "China had launched a crackdown and ordered authorities to buy computers with pre-installed legitimate software". In addition, it was also reported that 3,600 enterprises had come under the government’s "scanning". However, the applications they targeted are primarily the ones that come loaded on OEM machines (i.e. Adobe, Symantec, etc.). Buying legit pre-installed software will do nothing to prevent the pirating of specialized EDA, CAE, and other high value applications used to design and produce products in China.

-Vic

Hardening Active X Controls Used By Facebook and MySpace

As evident by vulnerability discovered in Active X controls used by FaceBook and MySpace (Gregg Keizersee's Computerworld article), Active X base applications are in general, great candidates for application hardening and protection approaches. In my own experience with gaming providers who use the same technology to enable on-line gaming, the application code is cached and executed on the desktop which makes it a prime target for reverse engineering and malicious tampering. Hardening the code and enabling real time tampering checks with a backend server would offer strong deterant against tampering of these components as well as discovery of the exploit itself.

-Vic