The Software Protection Initiative

PA #ASC-03-1124; ASC-03-2444

In December 2001, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics directed the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Science and Technology) to undertake the Software Protection Initiative (SPI) in order to improve the protection of application software critical to national security. To attain the goals of this directive, the SPI has set forth several goals, which are to: institutionalize software protection as part of the application software life-cycle; educate and train the DoD community; establish a wide array of user-friendly protection techniques; and ensure that protection technology and policy are appropriately applied to protect and extend our technological advantage. The vision of SPI is to establish software protection as an integral layer of the defense in depth concept for information assurance and complement existing information assurance efforts in network security and operating systems access controls with an application-centric approach to protecting critical DoD intellectual property.

The motivation for the SPI springs from the tremendous investment in high performance software that has been made over the past three decades. This costly investment has permitted the DoD to make significant advances in application software for scientific, engineering, modeling, simulation, training, and operational purposes. Examples of such application software include (but are not limited to) electromagnetic modeling software, signal and image processing software, and fluid dynamics analysis software. Because of software’s crucial importance to every aspect of military activity, the DoD is acting to protect its software technology from unauthorized use, theft, piracy, or distribution via the SPI.

The SPI program is addressing software protection deficiencies through the investigation, research and development of advanced technologies for software protection. SPI research is broad in scope and topical in nature in order to foster new, creative, and pioneering technology solutions for protecting software, and to mature existing software protection technologies.

The presentation will outline the vision and goals of the SPI, highlight recent software protection achievements in the protection of software of interest to the DoD community, and present an overview of current research thrusts that are advancing the state of the art in software protection.