Obsidium is a software protection system that was designed as an affordable and easy to implement, yet reliable way to protect your software applications from unauthorized modifications (i.e. "cracking") and provide a secure and flexible licensing/registration system. It is primarily aimed at shareware developers and companies who would like to provide evaluation versions of their applications, but is not limited to that scenario.

Key features

* Code virtualization
Code Virtualization allows you to transform certain parts of your application's code in order to make it harder to reverse-engineer, understand or modifiy. Native machine code will be converted into functionally equivalent byte code that is interpreted during runtime.

* Encryption and compression of application code and data
In order to prevent disassembly and static analysis or modification of your program file on disk, all code and data of your application will be encrypted using a strong yet fast cipher (AES) and its integrity verified. Additionally, you may choose to compress your application which will reduce the size of the executable by up to 50 percent.

* Time trials
Obsidium allows you to easily integrate time trial functionality into your software. You may set a fixed expiration date or have the application expire after a user defined number of days or executions.

* Integrated licensing systems using strong public key cryptography
Obsidium offers two built-in licensing systems that take advantage of high security asymmetric encryption to prevent generation of fake license keys. Depending on your individual needs, you may choose between long and short license keys (using RSA and elliptic curve cryptography, respectively) which can be distributed to your customers in binary or textual form. Both types of license keys support fixed expiration dates, hardware locking and license dependent code encryption. Both internal systems allow you to store some additional data in generated license keys.

* Protection SDK directly supporting Delphi, C++ Builder, Visual C++, Visual Basic and others
Include files and sample applications demonstrating the use of advanced features and the protection API are included in the Obsidium package.

* Transparency and ease of implementation
Implementing Obsidium in your application is quite easy and does not require any advanced programming skills. The protection system is completely self-contained and does not depend on the installation of additional components such as services or drivers.

* Counter-measures against disassembling, debugging, dumping and patching
Obsidium implements a number of counter-measures against various techniques and tools commonly used by crackers.

* Blacklisting of stolen or compromised license keys
License keys that were stolen (e.g. by credit card fraud) or leaked by a customer can be added to a blacklist thus invalidating the offending licenses in the next release of your software.

* Integrated customer database
Obsidium's integrated user database allows you to keep track of your customers and any license keys you issued to them.

* Runtime code encryption
Important parts of your code can be protected individually, providing extra protection against modifications while the program is being executed. You may also protect code in such a way that it can only be decrypted if a valid license key is present.

* Automation of protection and license generation
If supported by your development environment, newly compiled applications can be protected immediately. Moreover, a license key generation library is included (as a Windows DLL and Linux shared library) that can easily be integrated into your own or a third party online registration service.