Centennial Article: Application hardening removes economic incentives for piracy

Application hardening removes economic incentives for piracy

The massive scale of software piracy worldwide is leading to the development of a secondary security industry within the legitimate software field, known as "application hardening".

Globally, the value of pirated software amounts to around 50 per cent of the value of legitimate sales, according to SearchSecurity.com.

That ratio is considerably worse in some parts of the world, with as much as 80 per cent of the software sold in Russia, China and Vietnam being pirated, according to a 2006 study.

"Application hardening" is the technique of making software more difficult for hackers to break into, in order to get around licensing provisions.

While this rarely renders them unbreakable, it can change the economics for pirates.

"These guys are good; they understand machine code language and CPU architecture," said Victor DeMarines, vice president of products at application hardening business Vi Labs.

"We prevent the really skilled hacker from building class breaks [cracking the underlying security technology]. We take away the business incentive."

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About Centennial Software

Centennial Software (www.centennial-software.com) is a leading developer of asset management and network security solutions with more than five million licenses sold to blue-chip organizations around the world. Centennial's growing portfolio of solutions helps organizations better manage their IT infrastructure, maintain compliance and minimize operational risks. Centennial products are available through a global network of approved resellers and market-leading OEM vendors. The company operates offices in the USA, UK, Germany, Sweden and Australia.

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