Several methods have been proposed to alleviate this situation. The highest level of protection is achieved with cryptographic solutions, but, unfortunately, this requires dedicated hardware with integrated decryption and execution units.

A more modest level of protection is achieved through obfuscation. An obfuscator is a tool which -- through the application of code transformations -- converts a program into an equivalent one that is more difficult to reverse engineer. The advantage of this method is that it runs on standard hardware and without any changes to virtual machines or available interpreters.

Links to obfuscation tools, papers, and other resources can be found on the Obfuscation and Sofware Watermarking Page .