In the past few decades, software security became one of the leading important research issues in the software/IT industry. Software security is related to secure software or data from unauthorized alterations. Software security breach leads to huge financial losses as well as a deficit of confidential data in the present scenario. Generally, software security can be of two types as coding errors and intellectual property rights. Existing literature reveals that intellectual property can be broadly categorized into three types as software piracy, reverse engineering and tampering. Thus, in this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on software security types as coding errors and intellectual property right with their attacks and their protection methods as software watermarking tamper resistance, obfuscation. Moreover, one of the software security attacks as code clone is another vital research area for the present scenario is also discussed in this research article. In addition, a future scope is also propounded for academic clara.