An Approach for Safe and Secure Software Protection Supported by Symbolic Execution
Daniel Dorfmeister, Flavio Ferrarotti, Bernhard Fischer, Evelyn Haslinger, Rudolf Ramler, Markus Zimmermann
TL;DR
A novel copy-protection method for industrial control software that uses symbolic execution to guarantee the preservation of safety properties if the software is executed on a different machine, or if there is a problem with the PUF response.
Abstract
We introduce a novel copy-protection method for industrial control software. With our method, a program executes correctly only on its target hardware and behaves differently on other machines. The hardware-software binding is based on Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). We use symbolic execution to guarantee the preservation of safety properties if the software is executed on a different machine, or if there is a problem with the PUF response. Moreover, we show that the protection method is also secure against reverse engineering.