An Approach for Safe and Secure Software Protection Supported by Symbolic Execution

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel hardware-bound software protection method using PUFs and symbolic execution to ensure safety and security, preventing unauthorized copying and reverse engineering of industrial control software.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new copy-protection approach combining PUF-based hardware binding with symbolic execution to verify safety properties and resist reverse engineering.

Findings

Protection ensures correct execution only on target hardware

Method guarantees safety properties despite PUF response issues

Secure against reverse engineering attempts

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.