Software vendors want to prevent illegal distribution of their software. One approach is to split the product into several parts. For example, part of the installation of a product on a given system is customized for that particular computer, therefore using a copy of that installation makes it impossible to use on another system. Customization might mean using local fixed folders or even specific hardware classes or model numbers. It is even possible on proprietary systems to tie a specific hardware serial number or CPU ID number to code to confine that copy of that application to that specific system. Some vendors are using unique hardware tokens with each individual copy of their application.
Therefore, for vendors to ensure their product will run on specific hardware, the vendor only has to validate the application configuration environment. This is hardly failsafe, but still useful. Often coupled with this form of copy protection is license validation, the next logical protection to use
License protection
The license generator has to make sure that some of the following capabilities are enabled:
- That the application will be able to recognize an invalid license. Normally this is done through some form of verification. Some developers use cryptographic techniques such as a digest calculation or decrypting a license key associated with the application code base.
- That nobody else can generate licenses for the product. If the license validation logic is known, a convenient way to break the license is to generate another one. Hopefully there is solution to prevent that.
- That the license holder can be tracked using information from a given license. This would help stop unwanted distribution of the product.
These three capabilities will only be safe if the license verification code itself is protected.
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