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License Management Security
Software Security to Preserve Application Usage Policies
In recognition that software vendors need to adopt this new layer of protection for their software assets, industry analysts at Gartner have identified application hardening as an emerging space in its Hype Cycle for Data and Application Security, 2007. The message is clear: any software protection strategy must go beyond simple license management to fully protect revenue and maximize growth.
Addressing License Management Security
License management, dongles and electronic activation are all options that software publishers have to enforce the business terms of their product licenses with legitimate customers. However, as with any tier-1 technology, these measures alone do not suffice to fully protect your software and intellectual property as professional hackers have established refined expertise to circumvent, spoof or otherwise bypass these systems. This is evidenced, for example, by the sheer volume of counterfeit software websites and the regularity with which pirated copies appear within days if not hours of new software and game releases.
Hackers tamper directly with your software binary and reverse engineer your application to isolate valuable intellectual property for counterfeiting and competitive espionage.
Software-driven businesses are commonly threatened by professional hackers who:
- Distribute keys, patches and tampering hacks which dissociate license management, dongle functionality or other copy protection system from the application and enable unrestricted piracy. View Demo: How to Hack an Application →
- Heavily target technology with broad market adoption, making it particularly vulnerable. Utilities such as free debuggers, specific plug-ins to dissemblers and pre-canned unlocking scripts all arm casual and professional pirates alike.
- Remove or bypass a program’s access conditions
Security at Work
Application hardening broadly secures your overall application – its algorithms, its components, and even its license management layer – against prevalent threats like tampering, reverse engineering, code-lifting and code-injection. For devices and products that combine proprietary software with hardware, software protection solutions can also help ensure that these components remain strongly bound to each other.
Arxan’s GuardIT tightly binds the management layer with your software, and replaces single ‘yes-no’ points of failure with intricate connections specific to your software. Arxan’s GuardIT family of products harden desktop and server applications. Specifically, we have created an integrated protection with industry-leading solutions including FlexNET Publisher® and Microsoft SLP®. To learn more about how GuardIT durably and resiliently protects your native, managed and mixed-mode software against tampering and any manner of theft, click here.
Our security solution provides fast and easy point-click protection for applications using popular licensing solutions such as FlexNET® and Microsoft SLP®. Additionally, TransformIT provides protection for secret keys used to encrypt licenses, and public keys used to verify authenticity.
