WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. and SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — West Lafayette-based Arxan Research Inc. was awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to develop automated tools that reduce the time, cost and effort incurred by software developers when designing anti-tamper protection schemes for their applications.

The $98,082 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I SBIR grant from the Office of the Secretary of Defense will allow Arxan Research Inc., along with San Francisco-based affiliate company Arxan Technologies Inc., to establish project feasibility and may lead to a Phase II SBIR project to fully implement the proposed tools.

"This grant again underscores the strength and credibility of the Arxan team and our unique anti-tamper technology as well as the importance of our work to the U.S. Department of Defense and national security," said Richard Earley, Arxan's CEO. "The most effective way to protect the nation's most critical software assets against tampering is by a combination of technologies that protect, detect and react to such exploitation."

Arxan's technology, EnforcIT™, protects software by injecting a complex web of small security units called Guards™ into a binary executable to protect the code and each other. The first step to protecting software from tampering and reverse-engineering is for software developers to design a Guard network based on their protection needs and software structure. The level of achieved protection relies heavily on the quality of the designed network. Designing quality protection requires expertise in the latest attack, defense-in-depth and adversarial mindset techniques, making it difficult for mainstream software developers to design strong network protection schemes without expert assistance.

With this grant, Arxan will build on its existing technology to automate the design of protection networks. The company also has existing projects to develop an automated penetration testing platform and metrics for automated assessment of protection strength.

"Arxan's goal is to automate the entire protection process from design to testing, fully empowering all software developers to effectively protect their software and verify its security," said J. Eric Davis, Senior Vice President of Solutions for Arxan. "We already have technology that fully automates protection insertion with no impact on the source code. This SBIR grant supports our efforts to automate the protection design process, as well."

Prior to this grant, Arxan was awarded several Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) grants as well as an Indiana 21st Century Research and Technology Fund grant. Arxan's Red Teams and Software Protection Teams are led by three renowned industry experts with more than 100 years of computer science experience and 500 published scientific papers between them. Arxan's project leaders and contributing staff have expertise in computer security; reverse engineering; network security; real-time systems; cryptography; verification tools and techniques; secure protocols; and critical experience in building software protection and/or in discovering systems, software and application vulnerabilities. Team members frequently conduct Red Team and Software Protection training and workshops, and provide protection and penetration testing services.