Inhibiting software tampering
AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation
InventorsWei Wu, Frank Nian-Tzu Chu, Erik Fortune, Julie D Bennett, Mohammed El-Gammal, Simon D Earnshaw
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Tampering with pieces of software is inhibited. The obfuscation of a software image so as to becloud the comprehension of hackers in reverse engineering pieces of software comprising the software image is provided. A process of verifying whether the pieces of software together constitute a software package that requires protection from tampering is also provided. Another process for determining whether the hardware resources, such as the central processing unit or the cache memory on a computing machine, belong to a class for which inhibiting software tampering is possible, is also provided.
Claims20
A method of operating a computing machine to inhibit tampering of a piece of software running on the computing machine, the method comprising:
- invoking a protection function of an obfuscated protection dynamic-link library to inhibit the execution of unauthorized services;
- and
- invoking another protection function of the obfuscated protection dynamic-link library to protect keys and values of a central hierarchical database.
A computer-readable storage medium having computer-executable instructions that, when executed, implement a method of inhibiting tampering of a piece of software running on a computing machine, comprising:
- invoking a protection function of an obfuscated protection dynamic-link library to inhibit the execution of unauthorized services;
- and
- invoking another protection function of the obfuscated protection dynamic-link library to protect keys and values of a central hierarchical database.
A system for inhibiting tampering of a piece of software running on a computing machine, the system comprising:
- a processor to execute a dynamic-link library;
- means for invoking a protection function of an obfuscated protection dynamic-link library to inhibit the execution of unauthorized services;
- and
- means for invoking another protection function of the obfuscated protection dynamic-link library to protect keys and values of a central hierarchical database.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.