Then we get into online registration. You still have some kind of code, but the program will phone home back to the server to determine whether the code is valid and usually unique.
This stops basic key sharing, because the company knows if too many people from all over the world are all using the same key. Perhaps there is some kind of indentification involved using MAC address, too, with infinte registrations allowed on the same hardware but maybe a limited number on what appears to be a different computer.
This is still pretty easy and stops simple key sharing. People will actually have to get into cracking the software or faking the server response to get past it. Depending on how well this is obfuscated then it can be pretty difficult and time consuming to crack. Finally, a particularly guarded applciation might stay in constant contact with the server, refusing to work at all if the connection is severed. In this case to get arouind the activation you need to fake the server itself.
Steam emulators and private WoW servers are an example of this. I suspect a lot of the implementers will not give this information out because it opens them to hacking. But if I were to do this, this is how I would go about it:. For example, lets say I have some shareware I want to protect and when someone gives me money, I send them a 4-byte registration code.
I could build the algorithm into my shareware such that it validates the code the users enters. My algorithm would be as follows:. When the user enters a valid code, the software unlocks its regular functionality by setting a flag somewhere. Obviously, this is an extremely simplistic example. Registration validation algorithms can be as complex as you want. You can also perform this registration over the internet to protect your validation algorithm from reverse engineering, and keep people from sharing keys.
No validation scheme is perfect though. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Best IP protection also aims to enhance customer experience. License server is an outdated legacy solution that is blocking software companies from scaling up. Learn why and how to overcome this licensing problem. The subscription model is the main license model supported by most payment providers. But not all products can be forced into a subscription model.
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Tim Fisher has more than 30 years' of professional technology experience. He's been writing about tech for more than two decades and serves as the VP and General Manager of Lifewire.
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Thanks for letting us know! Email Address Sign up There was an error. Please try again. You're in! Thanks for signing up. There was an error. It's death by a thousand tiny textboxes. Tell me as soon as I've entered a bad value in the key. Why should I have to go back and pore over my entry to figure out which letter or number I've screwed up? You're the computer, remember?
This is what you're good at. Accept pasting from the clipboard. Once we've installed the software, we'll probably install it again, and nobody likes keying these annoying resgistration keys in more than once. I've seen some clever software that proactively checks the clipboard and enters the key automatically if it finds it there. Kudos to you, Beyond Compare.
Don't passively-aggressively inform me that "the key you entered appears to be valid. Or isn't it? What's the point of unique registration keys if you can't be sure? I guess paying customers can't be trusted. The key is important. Without it we can't install or use the software. So why is it buried in the back of the manual, or on an easy-to-overlook interior edge of the package?
Make it easy to find-- and difficult to lose. Provide multiple copies of the key in different locations, maybe even as a peelable sticker we can place somewhere useful. And if the software was delivered digitally, please keep track of our key for us. We're forgetful.
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