| Website | byteshield.net |
| Category | Software |
| Phone | +1-415-420-6636 |
| Employees | |
| Founded | 9/04 |
| Angel, 7/08 Gylling Investment AB |
ByteShield’s focus is protecting PC software applications and games against illegal copying without impacting your honest end-users. ByteShield is not pursuing protecting audio or video. Although ByteShield makes tampering with the protected application difficult, the primary purpose is to allow copying of the application only to the extent the publisher wants.
Vendors and users are both frustrated with existing DRM solutions that fail to protect against piracy because they are usually cracked quickly yet they inconvenience honest customers. In contrast ByteShield gives extremely strong protection without negatively impacting honest users. For example users can install the game/software on an unlimited number of computers and keep on adding installations, as hardware changes or system crashes etc. occur. The real item to control is not the number of installations; it is how many of these installations can be used, at the same time. Thus, with ByteShield, the permission to run moves from one PC to another.
In effect ByteShield’s technological approach to protecting software acknowledges that any protection created by man can eventually be cracked by man given sufficient time, effort and hardware. The real issues are the number of hurdles involved, the time to overcome each, whether they must be overcome one at a time or can be programmatically overcome. Conventional software protection technologies (Copy Protection/DRM) are often based on only a few hurdles and usually cracked quickly. In contrast ByteShield’s Software Usage Management (SUM) has high numbers of multiple hurdles, including removal of small but critical pieces of the code it protects and replacement of them at run-time. A cracker is forced to find and ‘fix’ one piece at a time. Even if a cracker can ‘fix’ each independent and different hurdle, each one will take a certain amount of time and if there 1,000, 10,000 or even 100,000 pieces of code need to be ‘fixed’, one by one, then the total cracking effort required will simply be too great to be worthwhile. ByteShield’s technology not only achieves this novel approach to software protection but does so with extremely low or no performance impact on the execution speed of the protected software. In addition ByteShield’s ByteAdmin™ gives publishers and developers remote usage control and management of licenses and activation codes as well usage reports and update control.
For more information see the whitepaper “Is Anti-Piracy/DRM the Cure or the Disease for PC Games?” which can be downloaded from http://www.byteshield.net/byteshieldwhitepaper0005.pdf
