Sentinel Hardware Keys

Protect your software applications from piracy by using these hardware keys for token-based licensing scheme and data encryption

Saturday, July 05, 2008

Software solution providers incur huge losses due to loss of revenue as a result from software piracy. This piracy can be in various forms, varying from malicious counterfeiting to license infringements. For instance an application being used concurrently by more than specified number of users, illegal copies of the application being distributed, etc, are all causes of concern for application vendors. To combat such threat of software piracy, which is widespread and becoming more sophisticated, SafeNet has introduced Sentinal Hardware Keys.

Sentinal Hardware Keys provide protection to software vendors from unauthorised use or distribution of their proprietary applications. It provides hardware based protection against software piracy. The Sentinal software protection devices are USB 2.0 compliant and when attached to a computer or a network can monitor and enforce the licensing of the software application which have been protected using this solution. The Sentinal Keys are a suite of USB devices called hardware keys and a software application called the Sentinal Keys Toolkit, which is used for preparing the protection and licensing strategy and also to program the hardware tokens. The programmed USB devices (keys) can be distributed along with the application, which will be used to activate that application and to enforce the licence scheme attached to that token. The application which is protected by Sentinal Key can only be used till the Key is attached to the computer or to a network. This way without the programmed Key the protected application is rendered useless.

Features
When using hardware tokens, hackers could sniff on the nature of data being exchanged between protected application and its hardware token, and thus produce clones of the tokens. The Sentinel Keys employ secure communication by using public key cryptography and 128-bit AES encryption to encrypt the communication. Since the key generation is highly secure and unique for each session, the cloning of tokens can be stopped. Also the Sentinal Keys Toolkit provide feature of Shell protection, using which the applications that are Win 32-bit executables or DLLs can be protected without altering the source code. It also provide business layer API protection, by which developers can use Sentinel licensing design methods and functions into their application's source code. Sentical Keys can be used for protecting applications created across numerous development environments and across different operating systems. The Sentinel Keys have V-Clock that allows time based licence schemes like demos or subscriptions to be deployed without depending on the system's time and thus preventing time tampering of the application's usage. You can either distribute Sentinel Protection Installer along with your application or can program your application to call this installer to enable Sentinel Keys to work on client machines.

Licensing an Application
We tried to protect and create a licence of a demo application created in VB, which was to calculate value of PI upto a specified decimal place. Using the Toolkit, we chose to the Shell protection and then created licence for one time usage of the application. Once after the application was protected and the Sentinel Key programmed, we tried executing the application on a separate machine where the Sentinel Protection Installer was installed, upon attaching the Sentinel Key the application could be used just once and after that an error message was displayed.

Bottomline: A good option to secure and package your softwares with flexible licensing models without spending time on development efforts for licensing.

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