CriticalBlue

Approov is an app authentication service that allows API backends to positively identify that requests are being made by a legitimate mobile app.[21]

Kristopher Sandoval, an author for Nordic APIs, conducted a fully independent review of Approov in February 2017 and noted that "... the threat to public-facing APIs in the mobile space is real, dangerous, and often inefficiently mitigated." [22]

After evaluating the Approov solution, he concluded that "Its approach to securing applications in the mobile environment is novel, and the way CriticalBlue goes about this is perhaps one of the more secure ways of doing so. While using cloud services for authentication is often highly questionable, their implementation in this case looks rock solid." [22]

While pointing out that "... preventing the types of reverse engineering issues that Approov is designed to stop is vitally important" [22] he recommends that companies should consider the possible savings of integration.[22]

According to Steven Puddephatt, Business Solutions Architect at the Racing Post, "[a]t the Racing Post we've historically had problems with data scrapers on our site and have relied on 'after the fact' mechanisms such as IP blocking. We are now [December 2016] on the precipice of exposing our API to the general public, and we are understandably reticent given the value of our data. We searched the market and only Approov offered the strong mobile app authentication and security we required [...] We are now very confident we can launch a public facing API without fear of unauthorized access."[23]

Bill Buchanan, Professor of Computing, The Cyber Academy, Edinburgh Napier University, stated, "[w]e have analyzed Approov for both its cryptography strength and also for an initial penetration test. The current system has very good levels of assurance which provide significantly reduced risk within the key application areas."[23]

First released in 2009, Prism dynamically traces software applications at runtime and captures data that can be used to analyze and identify the causes of poor performance.[24] Prism received the "Best of Show" Award at the 2009 Silicon Valley Embedded Systems Conference.[25]

Bryon Moyer, in Real World Multicore Embedded Systems, states that Prism's objective is "to provide analysis and an exploration and verification environment for embedded software development using multicore architectures."[26] Moyer also describes the Prism interface as a set of integrated views in the GUI that display interactions between threads, data dependencies, cache analysis, along with the microprocessor pipeline.[26]

Matassa and Domeika, in Break Away with Intel Atom Processors, similarly state that Prism is a "toolsuite aimed at optimized software development for multi-core and/or multithreaded architectures."[27] While mentioning the same analysis views in the Prism GUI described by Moyer, they also describe the dynamic tracing approach, whereby "traces of the user's software application are extracted either from a simulator of the underlying processor core or via an instrumentation approach where the application is dynamically instrumented to produce the required data."[27]

Finalized in 2003 and commercially released in 2004, CriticalBlue's Cascade is a C to RTL synthesizer.[28][29][30] Richard Taylor and David Stewart, from CriticalBlue itself, provided a chapter in Customizable Embedded Processors, describing Cascade as a "solution [that] allows software functionality implemented on an existing main CPU to be migrated onto an automatically...generated coprocessor."[31] They stated that this is realized as an automated design flow from an embedded software implementation onto a coprocessor described in RTL.[31] They identified offloading computationally-intensive algorithms from the main processor as the primary usage of such a coprocessor.[31] Cascade was awarded "Best Wireless Design Tool" in 2003 by the Wireless Systems Design magazine.