Arxan Technologies, a leading provider of application hardening solutions that protect software applications from attacks to minimize risk to code and intellectual property (IP), today announced it has extended its GuardIT software protection solution to encompass applications targeted for the Mac OS X platform. With the addition of GuardIT for Mac OS X, Arxan offers the industry’s most thorough protection for applications across multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, .NET and Java to protect against piracy, tampering, reverse engineering, malware or other forms of attack.
As the Mac platform continues to gain popularity, hackers are increasingly exploiting weaknesses in Mac OS X applications to invade end-user systems. This exploitation leads to application piracy, loss of application integrity, and loss of compliance with digital rights management (DRM) standards. These compromises threaten the business models of multiple industries, including independent software vendors (ISVs), gaming and digital media companies.
"The Mac platform has long been viewed as a safer and more secure than Windows," said Paul Roberts, senior analyst at The 451 Group. "The truth is that Mac’s small share of the total OS market explained the rarity of Mac-focused threats. That’s changing. The growing popularity and widespread use of Mac in the digital media market makes the platform an attractive target for hackers. Mac developers no longer view themselves as immune to application attacks and are adopting appropriate security measures to protect their code and valuable IP from malicious attacks."
"GuardIT for Mac OS X provides the most durable application hardening with security against reverse engineering and tampering, so software developers and producers can mitigate the risk of exploitable vulnerabilities and loss of revenues," said Mike Dager, chief executive officer of Arxan. "Our code protection solution protects critical algorithms, hardens license management and assists with DRM robustness rules compliance, and this has never been more critical than today when applications are deployed in distributed and untrusted environments that expose code to constant attacks."
Key features and benefits of Arxan GuardIT for Mac OS X include: • Diverse and customizable Guard types for code security, including obfuscation, encryption , anti-debug, repair, and checksum • Instruction level granularity to fine-tune code protection ranges • Binary level security which prohibits changes to the source code and the software development lifecycle (SDLC) • Tailored security designs to maintain performance levels, and build in resilience • Compatibility with third party license management, and support for Mac OS X versions 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6
