A tentative approach to constructing tamper-resistant software

Abstract

So far tamper-resistance has been considered as a property such as information stored in (I device is hard to read or modify by tampering. Such tamper-resistance is quite important in many situations: superdistribution, electronic commerce systems using IC card, pay television systems with decoders containing secret values for descrambling image and so on. Tamper-resistance ensures proper operation of a program and prevents extraction of secret data and abuse of the program. Moreover, tamper-resistance enables a vendor to enforce his own conditions upon users.