Digital Rights Management

With the rise of Psiloc's fame leveraged by quality solutions, came the issue of illegal channels of software distribution. This was a "too be or not to be" issue for a small startup company which Psiloc was at the time. The so called "cracking" of applications in the Symbian environment usually takes the approach of disassembling the binaries and looking for traces of code that resemble the calls to license check in Symbian OS. Since this flaw in Symbian security a method of additional ciphering of the binaries was introduced in Psiloc's proprietary security solution.

This is achieved by scrambling compiled binaries and ciphering their images with a symmetric ciphering algorithm for speed and low calculation complexity during decoding. Additionally the code is protected by a system of public and private keys ciphered with the RSA algorithm. The software is then published and shipped to market in a ciphered form, which is several factors more complex to disassemble and "crack" than the standard system approach. To complete this solution, a simple loading application is attached to the binaries that handle all necessary operations during the installation phase, giving the end result indistinguishable to the user form an ordinary installation procedure and look. On application run, the integrity of the binary files is checked to eliminate corrupted files, the application is then deciphered and loaded into phone memory with every application run. Such an approach not only secures the application in question, but also ensures that the reverse engineering of oc. Over thesecurity algorithms is close to impossible. This similar approach has recently been used with securing S60 Themes and Flash applications.

Since the beginnings of DRM Common Solutions from a security application it has evolved into a widely accepted industry standard, licensed to third parties by Psiloc. Over the years it has been transformed into a platform with opt-in/opt-out application and phone usage statistics, and a mobile advertising channel amongst other features included in the software.