Protecting executable from reverse engineering?

but they can all be worked around and or figured out by code analysists given the right time frame.

If you give people a program that they are able to run, then they will also be able to reverse-engineer it given enough time. That is the nature of programs. As soon as the binary is available to someone who wants to decipher it, you cannot prevent eventual reverse-engineering. After all, the computer has to be able to decipher it in order to run it, and a human is simply a slower computer.

What Amber said is exactly right. You can make reverse engineering harder, but you can never prevent it. You should never trust "security" that relies on the prevention of reverse engineering.

That said, the best anti-reverse-engineering techniques that I've seen focused not on obfuscating the code, but instead on breaking the tools that people usually use to understand how code works. Finding creative ways to break disassemblers, debuggers, etc is both likely to be more effective and also more intellectually satisfying than just generating reams of horrible spaghetti code. This does nothing to block a determined attacker, but it does increase the likelihood that J Random Cracker will wander off and work on something easier instead.

Safe Net Sentinel (formerly Aladdin). Caveats though - their API sucks, documentation sucks, and both of those are great in comparison to their SDK tools.

I've used their hardware protection method (Sentinel HASP HL) for many years. It requires a proprietary USB key fob which acts as the 'license' for the software. Their SDK encrypts and obfuscates your executable & libraries, and allows you to tie different features in your application to features burned into the key. Without a USB key provided and activated by the licensor, the software can not decrypt and hence will not run. The Key even uses a customized USB communication protocol (outside my realm of knowledge, I'm not a device driver guy) to make it difficult to build a virtual key, or tamper with the communication between the runtime wrapper and key. Their SDK is not very developer friendly, and is quite painful to integrate adding protection with an automated build process (but possible).

Before we implemented the HASP HL protection, there were 7 known pirates who had stripped the dotfuscator 'protections' from the product. We added the HASP protection at the same time as a major update to the software, which performs some heavy calculation on video in real time. As best I can tell from profiling and benchmarking, the HASP HL protection only slowed the intensive calculations by about 3%. Since that software was released about 5 years ago, not one new pirate of the product has been found. The software which it protects is in high demand in it's market segment, and the client is aware of several competitors actively trying to reverse engineer (without success so far). We know they have tried to solicit help from a few groups in Russia which advertise a service to break software protection, as numerous posts on various newsgroups and forums have included the newer versions of the protected product.

Recently we tried their software license solution (HASP SL) on a smaller project, which was straightforward enough to get working if you're already familiar with the HL product. It appears to work; there have been no reported piracy incidents, but this product is a lot lower in demand..

Of course, no protection can be perfect. If someone is sufficiently motivated and has serious cash to burn, I'm sure the protections afforded by HASP could be circumvented.