We introduce a novel copy-protection method for industrial control software. With our method, a program executes correctly only on its target hardware and behaves differently on other machines. The hardware-software binding is based on Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). We use symbolic execution to guarantee the preservation of safety properties if the software is executed on a different machine, or if there is a problem with the PUF response. Moreover, we show that the protection method is also secure against reverse engineering.
@article{arxiv.2603.10608,
title = {An Approach for Safe and Secure Software Protection Supported by Symbolic Execution},
author = {Daniel Dorfmeister and Flavio Ferrarotti and Bernhard Fischer and Evelyn Haslinger and Rudolf Ramler and Markus Zimmermann},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.10608},
year = {2026}
}