Russell Robinson wrote: Sure, but as is often the case, mighty corporation doesn't always equate to good software. Totally true! Although the larger financial backing is not always a bad thing. Some of the best protections were written by individuals. The best site I ever found was Fravia's (not sure about its current status, but you can find most of the essays written by people by searching for fravia on google). There were some very good ideas, and these were then set as crackme's for some of the best reversers, so if it was difficult to reverse then its a pretty good thing to implement! Although almost all the code is Assembly, but I would imagine you could probably implement reasonably similar stuff in C++, although for the more advanced protections there were suggestions of creating VxD's that would then have lower-level access to hardware. The only thing I'd warn about the anti-debugging stuff is that it may not be worth the hassle of doing it. There are quite a few modified versions of the popular debuggers (predominantly SoftIce) that aids it in being avoided in detection. Should be good to see how a new protection works, specifically one with a different approach to all the current ones. I've got a good hour on the train tomorrow morning so should be able to get some good thinking done :-)
