A Method for Construction of Software Protection Technology Application Sequence Based on Petri Net With Inhibitor Arcs

In the field of software protection, when there is a dependence between the various software protection technologies, the application order of these technologies must be arranged in a correct way in order to maximize the protection effect. When applying these technologies in a random way as the traditional methods do, an unexpected consequence may be produced, such as weakening the software protection effect and causing the protected software malfunction. To solve this problem, in this paper, a Petri net model is developed to describe the dependence behavior of applying multiple protection technologies. Then, algorithm is proposed to generate the reachable marking graph for the obtained Petri model. In considering different user requirements, based on the reachable marking graph, a method is presented to obtain a user-required and correct sequence of applying multiple protection technologies. The correctness of the obtained sequence is verified by a finite state automaton model. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the traditional ones.