54 TVBEurope Feature
For your eyes only Bond fights the pirates
Bond – Winston Bond – is European technical manager at ARXAN Technologies, a firm started by the US military to protect its software assets. Now the company offers anti-piracy tools to content owners. Neal Romanek reports
C
ontent piracy. The words make content owners shiver, conjuring the image of a ship hemorrhaging truck-loads of profits into the sea. And the problem is as old as media itself - even William Shakespeare had to endure “diverse stolen and surreptitious copies” of his work being circulated among the public. Piracy – especially on the industrial level it has reached in some parts of the world – can be crippling to a producer’s bottom line. Throw into the mix a host of new delivery methods – tablet, smartphone, OTT and IPTV, and promising new formats like Ultra HD – and the landscape for piracy expands to unmanageable dimensions. ARXAN Technology was started by the US military in 2001 to counter potential threats
to military software assets. Today it provides software encryption and security services to protect a wide variety of digital content, including mobile apps, removeable media, games and financial software. The battle against piracy has gone far beyond simple copy protection. ARXAN works to challenge software developers who are trying to unlock the operations of an application at the deepest level. Hacker culture is built on dismantling something to see how it works. Part of this ‘spirit of discovery’ is the reverse engineering of software to discover exactly how its code operates. ARXAN’s job is not just to prevent piracy of material, but to prevent the initial analysis and reverse engineering of software and systems all along the delivery pipeline.
Bond: “Every new device becomes a new potential attack point that needs protecting”
Bond, Winston Bond Winston Bond, ARXAN’s European technical manager, works with a staff of mathematicians and programmers who you definitely want on your side. Bond started his career working on semiconductors for the television industry and has years of experience developing software on a variety of embedded, desktop and mobile platforms. His team at ARXAN has developed a formidable toolkit that their customers can configure and deploy in their own software development.
“It’s a bit like Lego bricks – everyone has the same tools in their box, but they can put them together in different ways,” says Bond, “And every customer does something slightly different, which is an important part of making it secure. You don’t want an attack on one person to be able to be used on someone else. We offer the components to build secure DRMs and the tools to stop people being able to reverse engineer them or change them when they’re deployed on end devices.” Top among ARXAN’s areas of expertise are “obfuscation” and white-box cryptography – terms quite cryptic in themselves. Designed to stop reverse engineering or modifying of applications, obfuscation makes the intended function of certain parts of a piece
www.tvbeurope.com September 2014
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