Software licensing by hardware footprints

Hi guys and gals,

Do you know any good solution to authorize the software by hardware ID ? I'm looking for solution to authorize the software with IDs for eventual future customers of my software I'm thinking about developing. I would like to authorize users by hardware footprints + serial number . Do you have any experience on that field ? Has anybody had opportunity to work with Themida protection ? Can you tell anything about this solution ?

Thanks

There are a couple of solutions out there.

A company called Intsol does some software.
However it requires that the user install an application that runs in their task tray, and whoever they sell this solution to needs a US govt license to use it. There's a SHIT load of paperwork required (data privacy issues etc)

There may be some other solitions, but all the ones my old company looked at required some quite intense form filling in, updates, cost and the authorities interrogating you and what you did with the data you collected. In the end we gave up and used a call home (server based) solution on software startup.

Scritty

Looking for exact similar solution - if anybody has a better/cheaper/easier way than Scritty mentioned above - please update here !

if your platform is .net there are lot of companies which provide the sdk which you need to integrate in your software which you deliver it to your clients. And also some payment processors like plimus handle this mechanism.

Paid ones
http://www.softactivate.com/
http://www.lomacons.com

Free ones
http://installkey.codeplex.com/
https://github.com/ayende/rhino-licensing

If you want to develop one one your own, You might need to look into asymmetric cryptography + RSA encryption.

qrazy said:

if your platform is .net there are lot of companies which provide the sdk which you need to integrate in your software which you deliver it to your clients. And also some payment processors like plimus handle this mechanism.

Paid ones
http://www.softactivate.com/
http://www.lomacons.com

Free ones
http://installkey.codeplex.com/
https://github.com/ayende/rhino-licensing

If you want to develop one one your own, You might need to look into asymmetric cryptography + RSA encryption.

Click to expand...

Thanks for your links bro, checking those now +rep given !

One simple way is to get the user's hardware ID(HDD no, BIOS no, CPU id, etc) + user's email and encrypt them, send it to you and you'll have the serial key generator which'll generate appropriate keys to unlock the software. This method is simple and validates the key only once during the product registration. Other way is bit advanced which uses the above mentioned mechanism to generate keys and give the user + it also validates the key against the server everytime when the software is started.

But again if someone wants to crack it by decompiling the source and patch it, none of the methods are very effective. These methods are only helpful to avoid casual copying or sharing of files between computers.

blackguy81 said:

Looking for exact similar solution - if anybody has a better/cheaper/easier way than Scritty mentioned above - please update here !

Click to expand...

Some recommendations for UBot developers concerning Hardware Licensing?

Do not get me wrong though, the list shared is something I will forward to my programmers team.
As simple obfuscating and license verification doesn't do the trick any more.

The UBot thing is soley for me as I want to have another challenge in my IM carreer. Looking forward to a
reply.

Just use a good EXE protection mechanism that gives reverse engineers headaches - the good solutions come with hardware based licensing like Strongbit EXECryptor (Google it) <- I've had the pleasure of trying to reverse engineer that myself, has some very nasty anti-debugging and anti-dumping features and can obfuscate the machine code for you in critical sections (however a skilled reverse engineer can get the original machine code back). No protection is 100% bulletproof, but if you provide the reverse engineer with enough headaches it won't be worth their time.

This post is assuming you are protecting Win32 software. For other platforms you'll need other protection mechanisms, and some platforms are much harder to secure your app on than others.

Edit: Themida is also good, but has a much higher performance impact IMO