Software Protection Tools Coming

Software Licensing and Protection Services (SLP) will serve two purposes for commercial software developers: preventing unauthorized use through product activation and other technologies, and protecting the developer’s intellectual property by making it harder to reverse-engineer .NET source code from the executable. In addition, although SLP doesn’t share any underlying technology with Microsoft’s Windows and Office activation systems, broader adoption of product activation would serve to validate Microsoft’s use of the antipiracy technology. Up to this point, customers have tolerated Microsoft’s use of activation, but they may not be eager to see widespread use by other vendors.

Gained in Microsoft’s Jan. 2007 acquisition of Israeli firm Secured Dimensions, SLP helps developers protect their code by transforming selected portions of it into a secure format, called Secure Virtual Machine Language (SVML), and incorporating an additional run time, the Secure Virtual Machine (SVM), that enforces a desired set of licensing restrictions and makes reverse engineering more difficult.