Protecting Intellectual Property Rights of Industrial Software

• Thomas Ziebermayr

The importance of software is increasing and software has become the main driver of innovation in many industrial products. The value of software is growing dramatically, which requires effective mechanisms to protect intellectual property rights (IPR). Current approaches are expensive by means of involved effort or run-time performance, or they not as secure as required. Recent research results show promising results in the area of precisely identifying hardware environments, software obfuscation, and prevention of disassembling and tampering. The vision of a secure, effective and easy to use software protection is the core driver for the research project DEPS. The vision is that industry can securely deliver software together with their hardware products without the risk of infringement of intellectual properties rights due to illegal copies, reverse engineering, and modification.