It's also what allows those same hackers' dangerous malware to be deconstructed and neutered. Now a new encryption trick could make both those tasks much, much harder.

At the SyScan conference next month in Singapore, security researcher Jacob Torrey plans to present a new scheme he calls Hardened Anti-Reverse Engineering System, or HARES. Torrey's method encrypts software code such that it's only decrypted by the computer's processor at the last possible moment before the code is executed. This prevents reverse engineering tools from reading the decrypted code as it's being run. The result is tough-to-crack protection from any hacker who would pirate the software, suss out security flaws that could compromise users, and even in some cases understand its basic functions.