A Survey of Software Protection Methods Based on Self-Modifying Code

As the software industry develops rapidly, protecting software intellectual property from reverse attacker has become more and more important. The technical way is to make software hard to understand and will cost attackers more time and energy to crack the software than they can take. Self-modifying code is a code changing mechanism based on stored program architecture and has been widely used in software protection methods these years. This article introduces four different kinds of software protection methods using self-modifying code, and classifies the features of the implementation. The protection intensity and overheads are evaluated respectively. This article also compares the advantages and drawbacks of each method, and makes conclusions about the developing trends of software protection technologies.