KEYnote 36 English - Fall 2018 | Page 12

PROTECTION Automatic Protection for Your Software CodeMeter Protection Suite keeps expanding and growing in strength. AxProtector .NET Standard has joined the Protection Suite family as the tool for .NET Standard 2.0 applications; the other tools continue to evolve and become more powerful. The GUI has been given a facelift, AxProtector .NET is now FIPS-compatible, and AxProtector and IxProtector for native applications now support the execution of code on CmDongles. Overview CodeMeter Protection Suite is a powerful toolbox for the automatic encryption of appli- cations and libraries. It protects executable files from reverse engineering and ties them cryptographically to a valid license. The individual tools have been tailored specifi- cally to work with each platform or environment to allow optimum protection with minimum effort for you as an ISV. Whichever tool you choose, you select the firm code and product code (or combinations of them) to encrypt compiled libraries or applications. This is done with a key bound to the firm code and product code. Without the right license, decryption is simply impossible. AxProtector and IxProtector AxProtector protects native Windows, Linux, and macOS applications and libraries. It encrypts the entire code; when the application is launched or a library loaded, the system checks for the required license and decrypts the complete executable code, if the license is there. After that point, the application will perform just as well as if there were no automatic protections at all. 12 IxProtector allows you to mark and encrypt separate functions to be decrypted and executed during runtime. Depending on the settings, this is either done automatically or by an API call defined by the ISV. It allows you to move particularly sensitive code in separately encrypted form onto a CmDongle to be executed there. At no point is this code visible for would-be hackers. of .NET assemblies. It does so by encrypting the code of .NET framework applications on the level of individual methods: Each method is given its own stub code that checks for a license when the method is first accessed and only encrypts it if the license is present and correct. This can be compared to how IxProtector protects native code when choosing automatic decryption upon method access. AxProtector .NET This approach automatically creates a higher level of security. As the security level has an effect on performance, developers can fine-tune AxProtector .NET is CodeMeter Protection Suiteā€™s dedicated tool for the automatic protection