Additional code is added to sensitive code in order to foil an adversary attempting to examine or modify the sensitive code. The additional code implements a cascade failure system. In the cascade failure system an intrusion is detected by an authorization check, and when an intrusion is detected, further changes are made which will trigger failures of other authorization checks or cause corruptions to the internal execution state of the program. Eventually, the changes will trigger a complete failure of the code to run correctly, however the genesis of the cascading failure will be concealed, so an adversary will not be able to determine how the intrusion was initially detected. The insertion of the additional cascade failure system code can be performed automatically by a mechanism with some random components, and thus the locations and content of the inserted code may be different for each instance of sensitive code into which a content failure system has been inserted.