Arxan pushes add-on security, protecting digital content

Everyone is talking about privacy and the dangers of identity theft. One facet of privacy is the ability for the website to protect itself from hacking. Kevin Morgan, vp engineering at Arxan Technologies says that intellectual property (IP) protection requires application security to protect the license management.

Arxan makes the technology and a toolkit to protect internal mechanisms at run time. This software protects software in the wild by operating at the binary-code level to map security units to the code. The code is based on Department of Defense security requirements and works on all platforms and operating systems.

As an example of their code prowess, Morgan noted that on-line games average 2-5 days before the server is hacked and the game IP is available at other sites. Ubisoft changed the software architecture so some of the runtime code remained on the server. This extended the hacking interval to about two weeks.

One on-line gaming company is using their software and has not been hacked in over 4 months. The tool modified the code so the server and key addresses are protected. Now, the time to a hack is longer than the next release cycle, so the company is not losing users to rogue and imitation sites.

Morgan has a lot to say about IP protection and the underlying morality involved in hacking sites to get “free” content. The same people who take IP from sites do not perform the same actions with physical goods, so the value of the IP must be perceived to be much lower than something solid. (Or the on-line security and punishment are not as stringent as that in stores?) see more comments at http://arxancto.blogspot.com/