LOS ANGELES, July 30 (UPI) -- U.S. computer scientists say they've designed a system to encrypt software so it remains completely functional but impervious to reverse-engineering.
UCLA computer science Professor Amit Sahai and colleagues have designed a mathematics-based encryption system that allows someone to use a program as intended while preventing any deciphering of the code behind it, the university said in a release Tuesday.
This is the first time the technique, known in computer science as "software obfuscation," has been successfully accomplished, the school said.
"The real challenge and the great mystery in the field was: Can you actually take a piece of software and encrypt it but still have it be runnable, executable and fully functional," Sahai said. "It's a question that a lot of companies have been interested in for a long time."
Previous obfuscation techniques only created "speed bump," he said, forcing a hacker to spend some effort, perhaps a few days, trying to reverse-engineer the software.
The new system is an "iron wall" that makes reverse-engineering impossible without solving mathematical problems that would take hundreds of years of computing time, Sahai said.
"You write your software in a nice, reasonable, human-understandable way and then feed that software to our system," Sahai said. "It will output this mathematically transformed piece of software that would be equivalent in functionality, but when you look at it, you would have no idea what it's doing.
"You can inspect everything, you can turn it upside-down, you can look at it from different angles and you still won't have any idea what it's doing."
The system, if it does what it is said to do, would be invaluable for software designers and video game publishers, such as Electronic Arts (NASDAQ-GS: EA, Stock Forum) and Activision Blizzard (
NASDAQ: ATVI,
Stock Forum) as it would make cracking software infinitely more difficult – or at least difficult enough to see most hackers and crackers off, which could spur sales growth in a flat market.
UPI, with file by Chris Parry