Research on software protection based on virtual machine

Abstract Software security protection has become an important topic in the field of computer security. Most of the traditional software protection methods are no longer suitable for the requirements of modern software protection. This paper presents a new virtual machine (VM)-based software protection program, by which the X86 assembly instructions are compiled into virtual instructions that VM can interpret and implement. This method can greatly increase the difficulty of reverse analysis, and protect the rights of software developers and intellectual property. In addition, this method adopts a random instruction generation algorithm which makes different software instructions generated by our solution, so that the software security can be improved greatly. It is presented by experiments that the protective effect of the method above is good in either static or dynamic condition.