Bethesda, MD — November 5, 2007 — Arxan Technologies, a leading provider of application hardening solutions designed to protect software IP from piracy and tampering, today announced an addition to its GuardIT® family of products, GuardIT for .NET. This addition provides advanced code protection for Microsoft .NET framework applications. GuardIT employs dynamic Guard™ protection to harden purely managed applications, as well as today’s more typical combination of managed and native code applications.

Software piracy is rampant around the world and .NET applications have been among those most heavily targeted by hackers for reverse engineering. According to a September 2007 Gartner Hype Cycle for Information Security, 2007, “the increasing use of intermediate language representations (such as Java and .NET) enables hackers to easily reverse-engineer intellectual property (IP) embedded in software, but also enable security protection to be injected into the application without requiring the developers to modify the source code” (Joseph Feiman; Neil MacDonald, et al.). GuardIT’s advanced anti-tamper protection for .NET applications goes beyond simplistic and fragile obfuscation techniques, and is available on the market today for companies that require a durable and easy to use software protection solution for their .NET applications.

"We are seeing rapid growth and investment in .NET applications across the entire software development industry, and in particular in traditionally native C/C++ applications such as CAD/CAM or EDA software," said Mike Dager, CEO, Arxan Technologies. "These software solutions are also, unfortunately, among those that are reverse engineered the most, so offering .NET protection to our customers is a logical next step in the expansion of our GuardIT product line. Now, companies that deliver software products can ensure their code is protected against tampering or piracy, regardless of which programming language or languages their software is built with."

GuardIT for Microsoft .NET protects managed code in mixed-mode and pure managed-code assemblies, and provides various Guards for obfuscating and transforming managed code, and encrypting character strings. The obfuscation Guards in GuardIT for Microsoft .NET transform program instructions into code that is difficult for hackers to understand, for instance, by inserting garbage code. Arxan’s GuardIT is the only platform that provides best-of-breed protection for both native and managed code. GuardIT’s protection deeply and intricately binds these segments together in mixed-mode binaries, ensuring durable protection without high performance impact, and without affecting 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, GuardIT deeply fortifies the overall software product against piracy, tampering, reverse engineering or other forms of attack. GuardIT protects Windows applications in both 32-bit and 64-bit architecture.