Video Software Company Prevents Mobile App Piracy | Guardsquare

The Company

This leading software company designs and develops the top professional mobile video and photo imaging software for iOS and Android. Founded in 2011, the company’s main application has been used by many artists in the U.S. and India (Hollywood and Bollywood).

The Challenge

The company’s mobile application for Android smartphones was being continuously targeted and attacked. These attacks are attempted with the intention of pirating the paid app and putting unauthorized copies on third-party sites for free use, causing the company to lose revenue and hurting its brand reputation.

Guardsquare has helped to secure our app in every possible way.

— Director of Android Development

For security and compliance, the software company was using Google Play’s licensing service that enables companies to administer licensing policies for apps available to purchase through Google Play. With this licensing service, the company’s app can query Google Play at runtime to get the licensing status for the user and then allow or reject further use as needed.

Malicious actors figured out how to attack the company's app through the Google Play licensing check, giving them the access needed to copy and pirate the app. "Secure application development is a huge priority for us, so we knew we needed a better way to protect our app from these types of attack," said the Director of Android Development.

As a result of these attacks, consumers who didn’t want to spend the money on the app were using unauthorized free versions despite these apps being much less stable than the software company’s official app.

This had become a problem to the point where 40% of users were using unsanctioned, pirated versions of the app

— Director of Android Development

The Android development team was already using ProGuard to optimize and obfuscate the app, but they knew the app needed even more protection. The team of just four people needed a way to enhance the app’s code obfuscation while encrypting assets and adding protections at runtime.

The Solution

The software company’s prior use of ProGuard supported their choice of using DexGuard to harden their mobile application. DexGuard was deployed to obfuscate, encrypt, and apply runtime application self-protection (RASP). “DexGuard is able to encrypt assets and resources that ProGuard was not able to protect. This is extremely important from an intellectual property (IP) perspective,” said the Director of Android Development.

The Result

The company is impressed with the overall results of DexGuard. DexGuard’s features make it much more difficult for an attacker to clone or repackage the application for redistribution. “Guardsquare has helped to secure our app in every possible way,” said the Director of Android Development.

With the use of DexGuard, it’s extremely difficult to make a fully functioning, pirated app. “DexGuard has made it significantly harder to attack and pirate our app,” said the Director of Android Development.

Guardsquare has also analyzed past app attacks to find security problems and give the software company solutions to strengthen its security.

Developer friendly mobile app sec tools that:

Guardsquare offers the most complete approach to mobile application security on the market. Built on the open source ProGuard® technology, Guardsquare’s software integrates seamlessly across the development cycle. From app security testing to code hardening to real-time visibility into the threat landscape, Guardsquare solutions provide enhanced mobile application security from early in the development process through publication.

More than 900 customers worldwide across all major industries rely on Guardsquare to help them identify security risks and protect their mobile applications against reverse engineering and tampering.

The creators of ProGuard® | www.guardsquare.com