Now companies can protect software-rich IP against piracy and tampering to preserve revenue and brand erosion with a durable and customized application hardening solution.

"Increasingly, security threats to software are moving up the application stack and as complexity grows with the incorporation of content, such as rich media, it becomes imperative for organizations to adopt effective security strategies that help address these software risks," according to Melinda Ballou, Program Director of Application Life Cycle Management Service at IDC. "Integration of code protection within the software life cycle and development approaches can help improve security and overall security hygiene."

In response to this concern, Arxan Technologies, a leading provider of application-hardening solutions designed to protect software IP from piracy and tampering, has enhanced its GuardIT product. New features in GuardIT 2.0 extend Arxan's patented Guard-based protection across a broader range of programming languages and platforms, offering 64-bit chip architecture support and better defense against key injection attacks.

This technology can be deployed in a short period of time via a binary-based solution that is not intrusive and supports existing release schedules within an organization’s Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Software providers armed with GuardIT's increased code protection can gain greater control over specific and critical areas of the software, while remaining compatible with license management systems.

Here’s what GuardIT has added to its software IP protection arsenal:

64-bit architecture support assists software vendors, particularly in multimedia, engineering and scientific software areas, who are porting their applications to 64-bit chipset architectures to dramatically improve performance and capacity. With GuardIT, they can now fully protect their premium, high-end applications without adversely affecting performance.

Additional Guards for data protection secures not only the software code, but static application data (resource strings, algorithmic constants and global variables) against discovery and tampering…and protects secret keys and public authentication keys in License Management and DRM applications against discovery and replacement. GuardIT's breakthrough key protection techniques obliterates the entire class of “key injection” compromises where attackers replace public keys that verify desktop software licenses or discover secret keys to unlock entire libraries of multimedia content.

Compatibility with field debugging enables GuardIT to work effectively with crash dump analysis and similar mechanisms, making it the only solution on the market today that provides strong protection without impacting field debugging functionality. GuardIT also continues to provide lab-authorized debugging functionality, so software developers can fully debug protected programs under secure internal conditions.

Increased Performance and Vista Support means increased software protection performance with reduced memory consumption and faster protection speed. In addition, GuardIT 2.0 now supports applications built for Windows Vista in both 32 and 64-bit architectures.

Piracy and tampering cost organizations millions of dollars in lost revenue each year. Hackers’ ever sophisticated software cracking techniques demand a solution that keeps software providers one step ahead.

With improved performance, support for several third-party license management solutions and authorized debugging features, GuardIT is the most user-friendly software IP protection solution available today, integrating easily and smoothly into the software development lifecycle.