Bethesda, MD (PRWEB) October 30, 2008 – Arxan Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of application hardening solutions designed to protect software applications from tampering to minimize risk and maximize profitability, today announces the Company’s participation at the 1st Workshop on Virtual Machine Security (VMSec), taking place in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Computer & Communications Security at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia on October 31 from 2:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m. EST. 

Dr. John R. Rice of Arxan and Purdue University will be presenting the paper entitled, “Binding Software to Specific Native Hardware in a VM Environment: The PUF Challenge and Opportunity.”

“Virtualization is an important technology milestone, but what many software and hardware providers forget in the rush to ‘get virtual’ is the security risks it brings,” says Mike Dager, CEO of Arxan Technologies.  “We are excited to participate in this conference and to be at the forefront of the research and dialogue that is happening at this leading academic center.” 

This workshop, the first of its kind to deal exclusively with virtual machine security, will tackle important research topics in virtualization security.  The implementation of virtualization has exploded in growth and it is being used to study and prevent malicious software infection, yet virtualization itself is now the subject of attack.  There are many practical situations in which, by policy, software is supposed to run on a specific hardware instance. This is not only useful to combat piracy, but also in national security situations, such as a battlefield loss of critical technology, where it is paramount that an enemy be unable to rehost the system on a different set of hardware.   Attendees will learn how to guard against these attacks by using Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), and gain an understanding of the challenges and opportunities for virtualization that PUFs bring.