PSCP (yes, there IS a patent application) is not simple encryption. It goes much further. "Encryption works by leveraging millions of possibilities," says Paul Tyma, chief scientist (I suspect the ONLY scientist) at PreEmptive. "To decrypt a message you only need one key, but there are millions or billions of possible keys to choose from. That's a challenge, sure, but once you get the key, you are in and in forever. PSCP is vastly more complex. When a computer program runs, the computer can follow millions of paths to get the job done. We leverage those millions of paths and transform them into billions of paths instead. We no longer let a hacker reverse-engineer a program on paper, we force them to reverse-engineer as the program runs. Every time a piece (of code) runs, it can be different. You can't just examine program parts, you have to watch everything at once. It is orders of magnitude more difficult to reverse-engineer. And the increase in processing overhead is trivial. PSCP, if done right, costs almost nothing."

Misinterpretation PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column