Alternate Data Steams and Chess Programing

[Ted Summers]

I was reading the lastest issue of Hackin9 mazagine (Issuse 2/2008(15)) the other day when I came upon an article dealing with Alternate Data Steams. I was wondering is there a way to use this concept in Chess Programing to help prevent theft of code from chess engines.

For more on this, see some links below:

http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/altds

http://blogs.msdn.com/jerrydixon/archiv ... reams.aspx

[Harvey Williamson]

I was reading the lastest issue of Hackin9 mazagine (Issuse 2/2008(15)) the other day when I came upon an article dealing with Alternate Data Steams. I was wondering is there a way to use this concept in Chess Programing to help prevent theft of code from chess engines.

For more on this, see some links below:

http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/altds

http://blogs.msdn.com/jerrydixon/archiv ... reams.aspx

Hi Ted.

This may be better in the programming section. If you want me to move it there let me know or you can post the question again there.

Best Wishes,
Harvey

[Ted Summers]

Sure thing Harvey, by all means please do move it where you think its best.

Thanks

[Harvey Williamson]

Done!

[DarienSar]

Alternate data streams would not prevent decompiling. One of the first things you would notice with a decompiler, or even with a tool like ProcMon (http://www.sysinternals.com), is that the program is accessing an alternate data stream. Then you would proceed to examine the code in the alternate stream the same way you would have examined it before.

A quick way to look for alternate streams is to use streams.exe from SysInternals (see link above).