Romeo: SGX-Based Software Anti-piracy Framework

Preventing software piracy has always been a concern of software developers. Since crackers can track and analyze the application code, any client-side anti-piracy mechanism can only increase the cost of crackers, but cannot really stop them, unless the anti-piracy mechanism is put on the server along with the core functionality of the software. However, this approach harms the user experience. In this paper, we propose a software anti-piracy framework that makes it possible for developer to integrate anti-piracy mechanisms into the client-side without compromising the user experience through the use of Intel’s SGX technology.