A variety of techniques are employed with Instant to complicate the hacker’s job. Although we can’t reveal them all, a short list includes:
- Random Encryption. Hackers are more dangerous if they can make one patch that will work on all programs protected by a particular tool. CrypKey protection behaves differently on each application so that a hacker’s efforts on another software protected by CrypKey will not apply to your software.
- The Math Challenge. Often the reason why a program can be hacked is that the security function returns a simple ‘0’ or error number, so it is easy to rewrite the binary code to simply return ‘0’. CrypKey has a function that returns the result of a complex randomized calculation only if the program is authorized to run. The programmer can reproduce the calculation and check for correct results. but the hacker has no way to reproduce the calculation, since it is based on secret, encrypted numbers that are customized to each CrypKey customer.
- Encryption & Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRC). This is like a very complicated check sum. Encryption combined with CRC makes a powerful barrier to tampering with digital information.
- Activation of CrypKey Stealth A companion product integrated with both CrypKey SDK (Software Developer Kit) and CrypKey Instant that provides security by encrypting your EXEs and DLLs, as well as encrypting your program while it is running in memory.
For CrypKey SDK users, the software programmer has more responsibility to prevent hacking. Similar to with CrypKey Instant, CrypKey provides:
- The Math Challenge. See above.
- Encryption & Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRC). See above.
- Activating CrypKey Stealth. See above.
- Anti-hacking techniques. These enable the programmer to do as much or as little as necessary (as described in the product manual).