Bethesda, MD — October 17, 2007 — Arxan Technologies, a leading provider of application hardening solutions designed to protect software IP from piracy and tampering, today announced feature enhancements to its GuardIT® product. New features in GuardIT 2.0 extend Arxan's patented Guard-based protection across a broader range of programming languages and platforms, offering 64-bit chip architecture support and expanded Guard capability for key protection. With improved performance, support for several third-party license management solutions and authorized debugging features, GuardIT is the most user-friendly software IP protection solution available today, integrating easily and smoothly into the software development lifecycle.

Arxan's GuardIT offering provides durable, comprehensive IP protection for software, without adversely affecting application performance or the software development process itself. Through an interconnected mesh of small security units called Guards scattered across a compiled binary and then dissolved into the application, Arxan's protection deeply fortifies the overall software product against piracy, tampering, reverse engineering or other forms of attack.

"Increasingly, security threats to software are moving up the application stack and as complexity grows with the incorporation of content, such as rich media, it becomes imperative for organizations to adopt effective security strategies that help address these software risks," said Melinda Ballou, Program Director, application life cycle management service at IDC. "Integration of code protection within the software life cycle and development approaches can help improve security and overall security hygiene."

Enhancements to GuardIT include:

• 64-bit architecture support: Many software vendors, particularly in multimedia, engineering and scientific software areas, are porting their applications to 64-bit chipset architectures to dramatically improve performance and capacity. GuardIT now supports applications built for 64-bit architectures, enabling organizations to fully protect their premium, high-end applications without adversely affecting performance.
• Additional Guards for data protection: Arxan customers will now have the ability to protect not only the software code, but static application data such as resource strings, algorithmic constants and global variables against discovery and tampering. The expanded Guard library in GuardIT 2.0 enables protection of critical data, such as secret keys and public authentication keys in License Management and DRM applications, against discovery and replacement. GuardIT's advanced key protection techniques include traditional encryption as well as advanced check-summing and self-healing methods. With this capability, Arxan now defeats the entire class of “key injection” compromises where attackers replace public keys used to verify licenses for desktop software or discover secret keys to unlock entire libraries of multimedia content.
• Compatibility with field debugging: Software vendors rely on field debugging mechanisms, such as Microsoft’s crash dump files, to provide high levels of customer tech support. Arxan’s Guard technology is now compatible with crash dump analysis, making GuardIT the only solution on the market today that provides strong protection without impacting field debugging functionality. GuardIT also continues to provide lab authorized debugging functionality, where software developers can fully debug protected programs under secure internal conditions.
• Increased Performance and Vista Support: GuardIT 2.0 enables increased software protection performance with reduced memory consumption and faster protection speed. In addition, GuardIT 2.0 now supports applications built for Windows Vista in both 32 and 64-bit architectures.

"Hackers are going to continue to develop sophisticated software cracking techniques, which is why it’s so critical for software providers to have access to a solution that is always one step ahead," said Mike Dager, CEO, Arxan." Customers are asking us to expand the breadth of our offering, while maintaining our state of the art Guard technology, so we are excited about extending our software protection to 64-bit applications, and for comprehensible and durable protection of keys. These latest enhancements, along with our first-to-market field debugging capability, demonstrate our leadership and commitment to thwarting piracy and tampering, which is costing organizations millions of dollars in lost revenue each year."

GuardIT enables companies to protect software-rich IP against piracy and tampering to preserve revenue and brand erosion with a durable and customized application hardening solution. Arxan's technology can be deployed in a short period of time via a binary-based solution that is not intrusive and supports existing release schedules within an organization’s Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Now armed with GuardIT's increased code protection, software providers can exercise even more granular control over specific and critical areas of the software, while remaining compatible with license management systems.