We're Hiring!
We're Hiring!

From Silicon Glen to Silicon Valley

EdinburghApproov is a team of passionate developers dedicated to making the future of mobile secure. From our offices in Edinburgh, Scotland (UK), and Palo Alto, California, we focus on developing the world’s most complete end-to-end solution for mobile app security from the device into the cloud. Our solutions are used worldwide to secure mobile apps and their APIs in everything from automotive, financial services, healthcare to e-commerce, gaming and media.

Approov is a privately held company backed by leading investors including Lanza TechVentures, Scottish Enterprise and Herald Ventures.

A History of Innovation

The company — founded as Critical Blue Limited — was formed in Silicon Glen to provide cutting-edge research and development in code optimization and microprocessor design technologies to the semiconductor industry. For more than 20 years, CriticalBlue has been providing advanced software capabilities to the biggest names in technology including Intel Corporation, Thales Group, Toshiba and Freescale.

Core Expertise in Binary Level Analysis

In the 2000s, our initial technology platform was built to perform static and dynamic analysis of ARM machine code to generate highly optimized processor architectures from profile-guided analysis. Binary-to-binary code transformation was then used to map code onto the custom architecture. Later, we enhanced this technology to perform binary translation onto fixed instruction set architectures while preserving vector single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) optimizations.

We expanded our dynamic code analysis capabilities adding support for numerous processor architectures including x86 and POWER with 32-bit and 64-bit instruction set. By expanding beyond instruction level dependency analysis, our interactive development environment enabled optimizations for thread level parallelism extraction from existing code. This was widely deployed to a range of customers along with technical consulting services for code optimization with a specialty in cryptographic accelerators.

Transitioning to Mobile

In the mid-2010s, several projects related to the optimization of the Android runtime system for specific 64-bit chipsets added compiler optimization passes as well as runtime library enhancements to our platform. Android runtime consulting, coupled with our prior binary analysis and security consulting, led us to develop the key technology components that became Approov. The first commercial release of Approov was in 2017. We now serve a wide range and growing customer base.

 

Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

Our Unique Advantage

Our patented binary analysis expertise and technology platform enables us to develop highly differentiated technologies to ensure end-to-end mobile security.

We predicted an emerging security risk would come with the widespread use of APIs in the app economy and the vulnerabilities of mobile apps. Tampered apps and spoofed API requests have become an increasing significant business security challenge. Apps need a way to continuously identify themselves reliably to backend systems using more sophisticated techniques than API keys or other secrets embedded within apps subject to easy exploitation.

Leveraging our binary analysis expertise enables us to build the most advanced programmable and scalable runtime analysis engine capable of running within apps to provide real-time threat intelligence and runtime app self-protection (RASP).

We couple this with a SaaS cloud service and Real-Time Threat Analysis Dashboards to efficiently and securely partition the analysis between the client device and the server, providing our award-winning and breakthrough technology in application attestation. Unlike AI-based behavioral solutions, we take a deterministic approach that ensures the lowest latency, highest performance and most accurate results.

 

US Headquarters

165 University Avenue

Suite 200

Palo Alto, CA 94301 USA

P: +1 (650) 322-5300

UK Headquarters

181 The Pleasance

Edinburgh, Midlothian

EH8 9RU, United Kingdom

P: +44 0131 655 1500