IronWrapping™ your Product

IronWrapping is a sophisticated protection mechanism SoftwareShield uses to protect your games when you choose to IronWrap™ them.

You may choose to IronWrap your video game without making a single change to your compiled executable. In fact, the source-code of the game is not even necessary - just the compiled executable (and binary modules). You may also choose a "Hybrid" approach to protecting your applications. In this approach, you use IronWrap, but also invoke the ClientProtector right inside your application to offer the ultimate in high-strength protection combined with the supreme flexibility of a rich (virtual) COM interface right into the IronWrap system itself.

How to Use IronWrapping™

The easiest way to IronWrap a new game is to start the New Project Wizard in the License Manager and follow the steps. In the simplest case, it will take you less than 10 minutes to prepare, define, wrap and deploy a new game using IronWrapping.

In more detail, you will define the license projects that allow you to IronWrap your games by configuring a few settings in the License Manager and hitting "Compile". This will essentially "wrap" a mini virtual operating system around your program (and optionally data) like a protective shield. This virtual system will likely contain a pre-defined license model, logic and customizable user interface elements to allow the user to interact with the IronWrap system itself.

When you choose to IronWrap your product, you will define a number of settings to assist the IronWrapper linker in creating your protected product. These settings include things such as:

1. License Model - which is a pre-defined logical behaviour pattern.
2. User Interface settings - which allow you to control a multi-language distribution, and of course the actual UI presented to the user.
3. Protection settings - which allows you to define a collection of protection settings for your program. For example, this includes settings such as encryption algorithm, compression, Advanced Defense System strength and many more.
4. CodeRivets™ settings - which allow you to optionally include CodeRivets directly inside your programs code to add yet another layer of defense to protected sections of your code. These sub-sections have to be unlocked by a code exchange in order to execute.
5. Embedded Files - which allows you to embed binary files and/or read-only data files of any kind into the IronWrapped application. These files are transparently virtualized for your application so that to the application it is exactly as if they were on disk in the expected location (even though they are not). This can add a significant protection element to the strength of your defenses.
6. Signing - which allows integrated signing of the output using a standard digital signature. The IronWrap system can even be set to dynamically self-check to ensure the wrapped application has not been tampered with.
7. Host Settings - which of course allows you to define the root installation directory of the program you are protecting as well as the host itself.

That's it - once you have configured these options - just hit the "Compile" button and let the IronWrap system do the rest.

IronWrap features only come with the IronWrap Edition of the DRM Kit.