Application hardening, also known as application shielding or in-app protection, is the process of modifying an existing application to make it more resistant to hacking attempts such as reverse-engineering, tampering, and monitoring.

As long as there are applications, there will be application vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackers. One of the most common ways vulnerabilities are introduced is through ordinary coding errors. The industry standard sits at 15 to 50 errors per 1,000 lines of code. With modern applications containing tens of thousands to millions of lines of code, thousands of potential flaws of varying levels of severity may exist within any application.

Hackers can exploit these vulnerabilities to steal intellectual property and sensitive data, obtain cryptographic keys, or hijack the application for malicious purposes.

Application hardening shields these vulnerabilities from attack. Depending on the degree of hardening employed, it can protect partially or fully against static analysis of your source code, dynamic analysis of your application at run time, attacks that attempt to bypass application or system controls, and even code tampering.