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Sentinel Hardware Keys

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

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.

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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.

Price: Rs 1639



Meant For: IT managers and developers


Key Specs: Shell and API protection, Time based licensing, 128-bit AES
encryption



Pros: securing software, flexible licensing schemes, remote activation
and updates



Cons: Shell support for Win 32-bit exes and dlls only


Contact: SafeNet India, Noida


Tel: 0120 4020555,


Email: info.apac@safenet-inc.com


SMS Buy 130686 to 56677






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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