Tamper Resistance Considerations

Developing Applications Using The SoftwareShield System > Deploying Licensed Software > Tamper Resistance Considerations

## Tamper Resistance Considerations

### IronWrapping Tamper Resistance

There are numerous tamper resistance (protection) settings on the IronWrap Protection tab in your License Manager. The specific details of how these protections work is purposely withheld to enhance the security of the system.

If you have stability issues with your IronWrapped applications or unexpected behaviour, turn off/down all these settings to the minimum and re-test. Once you find your application behaving correctly, slowly re-enable/turn-up the features one by one and re-test until you are satisfied with the protection level and the behaviour is exactly as expected.

For more information about the individual IronWrap protections please see IronWrap Protection in the Feature guide.

If you run into an issue or stability/behaviour problem that you would like us to look at, please feel free to contact us under your Maintenance Support Agreement and our engineers will investigate and possibly directly work on your application and license project to isolate and correct the issue.

### Non-IronWrapping Tamper Resistance

There are six individual tamper resistance settings that you can individually toggle on or off. For specific details about these, please see Tamper Resistance in the Feature Guide.

You should consider whether your user will typically be a software developer that has a legitimate need for de-compiling tools like SoftICE or process monitoring tools like FileMon. If you enable detection of these tools, then your license will prevent your application from running on your users system. Further if your user has a legitimate need to debug your program using a kernel mode debugger, again, your program will simply shut down for them as soon as the debugger is detected.

Generally, most users have no need for specialized hacker tools like SoftICE or debugging your program, so you are fairly safe enabling this option, unless you know of some specific need by your customers.

However, be sure that during development, you keep these flags turned off since you will probably be unable to debug your own software. If they are on, when your debugger (in your IDE for example) attaches to the running process, as soon as the ClientProtector detects this, it will immediately cause the entire process to simply shut-down.

If you choose to use these flags, simply make sure that the very last thing you do before distributing the license is to turn them on, re-compile and test (outside of the IDE on a machine without SoftICE installed).