Heidi Rakels

CEO

GuardSquare

GuardSquare is the global reference in mobile application protection. We develop advanced software for the protection of mobile applications against reverse engineering and hacking.

GuardSquare was founded in 2014 in Leuven (Belgium), but its roots go back to 2002. In that year, Eric Lafortune, now CTO of GuardSquare, released ProGuard, open source software for the optimization of Java and Android applications. ProGuard turned out to be highly successful: it has been downloaded millions of times since its release and has a user base of over one million developers. With the establishment of GuardSquare, the expertise acquired through the development of ProGuard could be leveraged to meet the increasing demand for mobile application protection software. The ensuing solution, DexGuard, quickly established itself as the standard for the protection of Android applications across a wide range of industries, from financial services, e-commerce, telecommunication and the public sector to gaming and (new) media. In 2016, we extended our product line with iXGuard, our security solution for the protection of applications on the iOS platform.

Our approach to mobile application security is based on two complementary sets of techniques: code hardening and runtime application self-protection (RASP). We harden the source code of applications and SDK’s by applying a variety of mutually reinforcing obfuscation and encryption techniques. In addition, we add security mechanisms to mobile applications and SDK’s that continuously check their integrity and the integrity of the devices on which they are running.