Have you ever used code virtualizer or vmprotect to protect from reverse engineering?
I know that there is no way to fully protect our code. I also know that if a user wants to crack our app, then he or she is not a user that would buy our app. I also know that it is better to improve our app.. instead of being afraid of anticracking techniques. I also know that there is no commercial tool that can protec our app.... I also know that....
Ok. Enough. I've heard everything. I really think that adding a little protection won't hurt.
So.... have you ever used code virtulizer from oreans or vmprotect? I've heard that they are sometimes detected as virus by some antivirus.
Any experiences that I should be aware of before buying it. I know it creates some virtual machines and obfuscates a little the code to make it harder to find the weaknesses of our registration routines.
Is there any warning I should know?
Thanks. Any advice would be appreciated.
Jag
Answer
In my humble opinion, you should be lucky or even eager to be pirated, because that means your product is successful and popular.
That's plain incorrect. My software that I worked many months on was cracked the moment it was released. There are organised cracking groups that feed off download.com's RSS channel etc and crack each app that appears. It's a piece of cake to extract the keygen code of any app, so my response was to:
a) resort to digital certificate key files which are impossible to forge as they are signed by a private AES key and validated by a public one embedded in the app (see: aquaticmac.com - I use the stl c++ implementation which is cross-platform), along with.
b) The excellent Code Virtualizer™. I will say that the moment I started using Code Virtualizer™ I was getting some complaints from one or two users about app crashes. When I removed it from their build the crashes ceased. Still, I'm not sure whether it was a problem with CV per se as it could have been an obscure bug in my code, but I since reshuffled my code and I have since heard no complaints.
After the above, no more cracks. Some people look at being cracked as a positive thing, as it's a free publicity channel, but those people usually haven't spent months/years on an idea only to find you're being ripped off. Quite hard to take.