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Software Systems suffer from piracy, weak security implementation and
insufficient access control. Non secure software may lead to financial losses,
intellectual property losses and privacy losses.
Software Piracy
Attacks any type of Software Systems. It provides public users with
un-protection version of the Software (Cracked Software). Users shares and
exchange the unprotected Software internally or globally through the internet.
Millions of cracks are available in the internet for many software applications
and versions. Also, expert and non-expert cracking tools are available to
internet users.
Usually piracy is used to unprotect the software, however sometimes it is used
to remove the limitation of functionality and the number of users from the
protected programs.
Furthermore, sometimes competitor companies uses cracking tools to apply the
reverse engineering and unprotect the data files, the software libraries and
understand the complicated software algorithms. Those items can be used to
develop another software with similar or better features.
Software piracy may lead to serious financial problems, whenever the software is
cracked there is no way to stop users from using the un-protected version.
Weak Security Implementation and Insufficient Access Control
Many Software applications provide some security services like digital
signature, secure communication, data encryption, and data integrity check. The
provided security strength and efficiency may vary from implementation to
another. Security implementation required long experience with available
methods, approved standards and existing security holes.
Statistically, 80% of the existing software does not support any security level.
Major part of the rest suffers from many security holes due to weak and
inexperienced implementations.
Access Control is another important issue especially in multi-user systems.
Until now 99% of access control systems use ordinary username/password mechanism
to identify the user. Password based protection suffers from many attacks. Users
use weak, predictable, known words for their passwords. In many situations,
users inform their work colleagues with their passwords, and forget to change
them. Key loggers tools spread everywhere to spy on users passwords.
Governments, Banks and Enterprises become aware of security threats; they
request to have certain level of digital security and access control in any used
applications. The next generation of software systems must obey these rules.
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