Protection against cracking - specifically ways to make a program harder to decompile

Question

I'm making a commercial product that will have a client and server side. The client is totally dependent on the server , just to make it harder to crack/pirate . Problem is , even so there is a chance that someone will reverse engineer the protocol and make their own server.

I've thought about encrypting the connection either with ssl or with another algorithm so it won't be so easy to figure out the protocol just from sniffing the traffic between the client and the server.

Now the only thing I can think of that pirates would use is to decompile the program, remove the encryption and try to see the "plain text" protocol in order to reverse engineer it.

I have read previous topics and I know that it's impossible to make it impossible to crack , but what tweaks can we programmers bring to our code to make it a huge headache for crackers?

Answer 1

Read how Skype did it. Anyway, in general, that's impossible.