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Software Protection for ISV's
Anti-Piracy Technology
Losses from software piracy worldwide continue were estimated at $48B. Sophisticated for-profit piracy is rampant, with pirated software websites often indistinguishable from legal software outlets. The result: professional pirates are one of your most formidable competitors today.
Being a software publisher you face a unique challenge in balancing the widespread adoption of your product and preserving the viability of your business model given the sophistication and relentless activity of hackers. Furthermore, the affects of a global piracy also hurts your customers as it changes the marketplace dynamic in which they in turn must compete. As their competitors use pirated versions of your products, they are able to gain illicit margins over your customers cost structure, which puts your customers at a disadvantage. Along with malware exploits are also a problem. Software applications are the target of choice for next-generation malware attacks. As a result, customers are demanding vulnerability-free products and timely patches.
Software is the lifeblood of today’s digital economy. However, once deployed, it is subject to reverse engineering and tampering. Consequent threats include:
- Proprietary Intellectual Property Extracted and Counterfeited
- Malware Exploits
- Dissociating License Management and Dongle Functionality from the Application
GuardIT protection comprehensively mitigates these threats. GuardIT includes defense measures and active detection measures that result in robust yet low-impact protection against piracy and tampering. Additionally, when attacks are detected, the protection can be programmed to react in policy-driven, threat-specific ways. These can range from permissive reactions such as simple user notification, to aggressive measures including covert traitor tracing and application termination. Request a GuardIT Live Product Demo
The bottom line is that your business depends on your ability to provide and protect a rich product to your customers. Although you invest millions R&D, testing, marketing and license management of your software asset, research estimates that for every 2 dollars of software you sell, 1 dollar’s worth is pirated. To effectively address risk exposure from piracy and malware exploits, Arxan’s application hardening technology and best practices provides a strong resolution.
Application hardening protects your software-based IP from theft, piracy and malware. Successful protection not only raises revenue and preserves IP, but reduces technical support overhead, reduces the need for disruptive hot fixes, and increases customer satisfaction. Arxan’s Guard technology solves the entire gamut of software protection challenges from reverse engineering and tampering to counterfeiting and malware vulnerabilities. Our GuardIT solution easily, yet durably protects license-managed software applications, IP-rich applications, extensible software platforms and software-powered embedded devices against all forms of compromise and theft. GuardIT also provides in-depth defense for tier-1 security solutions such as data encryption products, anti-malware software, VPN software, and perimeter security products.
How do I implement a comprehensive security solution without affecting my development process and schedule?
Securing code manually is costly and time-consuming process requiring highly skilled security experts. Additionally, techniques based on source code impact performance and cannot be used to generate durable protection. You need dynamic binary level protection that does not require large resources of time or engineers to implement and update. Arxan’s key to development friendly protection is the separation of security and development. Arxan fully automates the protection process with your nightly build after you compile your code; no modification of the source code is necessary. Your security team can be completely separate from the development team. This minimizes your security’s opportunity cost, and maximizes productivity of your security, development and quality assurance teams.-
Do I need to compromise application performance for software security?
Some protection solutions impose large (up to 20%) performance penalties. These solutions force the developer to choose between performance impact and percentage of application that is secured. This is an unacceptable trade-off.
Arxan protects at the binary, not the source code, level, ensuring that your application’s performance is not comprised. Furthermore, Arxan does not compete with your compiler or optimizer. Test results have shown that the impact of Arxan on run-time performance of protected programs is very low. Arxan provides total security coverage with total application performance. -
Won’t Application Hardening Alienate My Legitimate Customers?
When application hardening solutions are weak, they resort to invasive measures and obstructive techniques to try and protect your applications. Guard technology is not only inherently strong, but can be precisely woven into your application and only “shows its face” when illegitimate behavior or attacks are detected. Protection is self-contained within your software application boundaries, and the end-user’s kernel and operating system are not altered in any way. Because GuardIT allows you broad flexibility in how the application reacts to attempted attacks, you can implement security policies that strike the right balance between prevention of piracy and preservation of legitimate user experience. -
With limited time and resources, how do I fix all the vulnerabilities my security assurance software reported?
Patch and obfuscate with Arxan, buying time for source-level fixes. -
Interaction with outsourced development and/or outsourced testing
Source code unaffected. Debugging/Quality assurance aids facilitate testing of protected binaries. Special files also help field support determine if errors are due to attacks/Guards firing, else help correlate point of fault with original unprotected source code.
