Guard is the first electronic licensing solution for the PHP marketplace combined with the encoding solution that pioneered PHP intellectual property protection.
Guard enables software vendors to maximize profitability with intellectual property protection and software license management.
Guard is the first Electronic Licensing solution for the PHP marketplace, combined with the Encoding solution that pioneered PHP intellectual property protection.
Your unprotected intellectual property, in the form of plain text PHP scripts and software with no license restrictions, can be copied, modified, and maintained by someone else. It is open to your competitors, to hackers, and to well-meaning developers at deployed customer sites.
The Guard is comprised of two components providing a dual layer of protection for PHP applications.
Zend Guard is the industry standard in PHP intellectual property protection. It protects exclusive and commercial PHP applications by encoding PHP scripts. Developers enjoy the benefits of a leading open-source language, while protecting PHP code when ready to distribute applications. By protecting applications, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) expand distribution and revenue on maintenance and support.
Code Obfuscation let’s Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), developers and businesses improve intellectual property protection from reverse engineering by obfuscating PHP source code.
Three levels of protection are available:
Encoding only &endash; Full encoding but no obfuscation for full backward compatibility.
Basic - Obfuscation of local variables names.
Strong - Obfuscates all function names, function calls, class names, class methods and local variables. (Not including code components added to the Exclude List).
Guard supports the latest industry standard with full support for PHP 5.1.
The License Manager enables ISVs to manage the commercial distribution of their PHP applications by generating license keys and creating files that require a license key to operate. Software vendors can easily specify license models without changing their application's source code. Licensing PHP applications enables software vendors to dramatically penetrate their available market, enhance customer loyalty and account penetration, resulting in increased revenue and profitability.
The License Manager extends to developers and ISVs the option to not only protect that code from copyright infringement, but also impose license restrictions on those files by marking such encoded files as ones that require a license to operate. The License Manager generates unique licenses based on defined criteria, manages those licenses and then ensures those files require the licenses to operate. Applications will not run unless the proper software license is found, allowing vendors to invoke license policies that will result in maximized sales.
Developers use Guard to encode PHP script at any time during the development process, but more importantly prior to distributing or publishing it.
Guard encodes PHP scripts in several different ways.
The following lists examples of file encoding options:
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Expedited at Run-time - Eliminating compilation and optimization at run-time. |
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Unreadable Source Code - Files are encoded and not in a human readable format. |
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Require Valid License - Files can be encoded to support or require licensing. |
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Time Limited - Files can be encoded to expire at a set date. |
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Encoded-Only Mode - Files can be set only to cooperate with associated encoded files that bear the same encoded signature. |
The encoding functions are accessible through an integrated User Interface
