Bounding an Obfuscated Program to a Specific Hardware Platform

The topic area of this work is node-binding. Node binding is the problem of binding software to a specific instance of a hardware platform. Applications of node binding include protection of copywrited software and digital media. The specific focus of this work will be the creation of a software mechanism which can be used to bind an arbitrary piece of software to a specific x86 hardware platform instance. Study must be made of the literature and the hardware platform in question so that a technique for node binding can be devised. Furthermore, the software mechanism or 'module' which will be created will require the use of obfuscation tools already available in the Cloakware toolset. Finally, when finished, the module will integrate with the existing Cloakware toolset so that any code which makes use of Cloakware products will have a mechanism through which it is being bound to an x86 platform.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Carlisle Adams

Student:

Michael Bodis

Partner:

Cloakware Corporation

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

University of Ottawa