By Tu Le I've worked in the security industry for over 15 years and I often get requests to help developers quickly integrate security protection into their applications. There are many piracy prevention solutions to lend a helping hand, including using software licensing and protection. Another option is to use executable packers and encryptors, which are often referred to as application shelling or hardening. What is Application Shelling Application shelling is a technology that a few software security companies offer to highlight how easy and effective it can be to protect software application intellectual property from being reverse engineered. As the name suggests, application shelling is a process where security functions are injected into the program and then encrypted based upon some industry standard such as AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). Typically due to time constraints or in some cases, a lack of source code, the use of this technology is attractive to software publishers because it provides the ability to quickly get the product out the door. It also prevents novice crackers from modifying a few bytes of the executable to circumvent security such as the infamous “JNZ to JMP”