Application hardening for software vendors

Your shipped app is your source code to an attacker.

And AI just made that trivial. An attacker drops your decompiled app into a large language model and gets readable logic, extracted secrets, and the makings of a working clone in minutes — no reverse-engineering expertise required.

Fortifie hardens the compiled applications you ship — Android, native desktop, JVM and .NET — so the secrets, logic and licensing inside them are far harder to extract, crack or tamper with.

Request an assessment See measured results

Built for teams that distribute binaries to machines they don't control.

decompiler output

Unprotected build

class LicenseValidator {
  static final String API_KEY =
    "ak_prod_9f3a…";
  boolean verifySignature(byte[] d)

Fortifie-hardened build

class a {
  static final String b =
    c.d(0x2e, 0x91);  // encrypted pool
  boolean e(byte[] f)

Illustrative example.

The problem

Every copy you distribute is a copy an attacker can take apart.

Once your app leaves your build pipeline, it runs on hardware you don't control. Free, widely available tools turn compiled code back into readable structure in minutes. That is a supply-chain exposure for you, the vendor.

Secrets walk out

API keys, endpoints, tokens and credentials embedded in a build can be lifted straight out of the binary with standard static tools.

Logic gets reconstructed

Readable class, method and symbol names let an attacker map your proprietary algorithms and, in effect, rebuild a working picture of how your product works.

Controls get bypassed

License checks, feature gates and integrity checks can be located, patched and redistributed — or stepped through live in a debugger.

The new threat

AI changed the attack. Your defense has to be live.

Reverse engineering used to be slow, specialist work. That assumption is gone. Large language models read decompiled Android, native, JVM and .NET code, explain what it does, rebuild it, and surface hardcoded keys on demand. The skill barrier dropped to a copy-paste — and the volume of attempts rises with it.

Simple obfuscation alone no longer holds, because a model can often see straight through renaming. Fortifie answers on two layers that work together:

  • Make the artifact hostile to AI analysis

    Control-flow flattening, string and secret encryption, and optional code virtualization on native targets turn a clean decompile into output that is noisy, incomplete and expensive for a model to reconstruct. The easy copy-paste stops working.

  • Defend at runtime, in real time

    Fortifie's in-app protection watches for the instrumentation attackers and their tooling rely on — debuggers, Frida, hooks, tampering, rooted and emulated environments — detects it as it happens, responds live, and streams each threat event to your dashboard the moment it fires.

How it works

Assess. Protect. Monitor.

  1. 01

    Assess

    We run the same public reverse-engineering tooling an attacker would against your build and show you what is exposed: recoverable secrets, readable symbols, and the logic that can be traced.

  2. 02

    Protect

    Fortifie hardens the compiled artifact: symbols are stripped or renamed, control flow is flattened, strings and secrets move into encrypted pools decrypted at runtime, and in-app runtime protection (RASP) is added to detect and respond to debugging, instrumentation and tampering.

  3. 03

    Monitor

    Runtime protection reports each threat event to your dashboard as it fires. Re-run the assessment on each release to confirm the protections held and nothing new leaked, so hardening keeps pace with your shipping cadence.

What hardening applies

  • Symbol stripping and renamingClasses, methods and symbols lose the names that make code easy to navigate.
  • Control-flow flatteningReadable branches and loops are restructured into a flat dispatch, so recovered logic is far harder to follow or rebuild.
  • String and secret encryptionLiteral strings and embedded secrets become encrypted pools with small decrypt stubs, instead of plain text in the binary.
  • Code virtualization on native targets (optional)Opt-in, off by default: selected native functions are translated into bytecode for an embedded virtual machine, hiding their original instructions.
  • Runtime defenses (RASP)In-app checks for debuggers, Frida and other instrumentation, hooks, integrity tampering (self-verification), and rooted or emulated environments, with a response at runtime.
  • Live threat-event reportingEach runtime detection is reported as a typed threat event to your dashboard the moment it fires.

Platforms

One approach across the platforms you ship.

  • Android

    APK / DEX applications

  • Native

    macOS, Windows and Linux binaries

  • JVM

    Java and other JVM bytecode

  • .NET

    Managed .NET assemblies

  • iOS

    In progress

Measured results

What standard tools recovered, before and after.

An internal backtest on four test applications we built and own, with secrets planted in each. We attacked unprotected and Fortifie-hardened builds with public reverse-engineering tools: jadx, apktool, radare2, CFR and monodis.

Unprotected builds

18/18

planted secrets recovered by static tools

Hardened builds

0/18

planted secrets recovered by the same tools

  • Symbols stripped or renamed in hardened output
  • Strings converted to encrypted pools with decrypt stubs
  • Runtime defenses tripped when a live debugger was attached (native and JVM)

Find out what your build gives away.

Tell us what you ship and which platforms. We'll reply with next steps for an assessment.

Email founder@fortifie.xyz

Please don't send credentials, keys or source code by email. We'll agree a secure way to share builds.