4 ms·
What exactly do you want to protect against? In my personal experience, customers can be trusted and hackers don't care about your software. For my own softwar
by azeirah 10y ago
What exactly do you want to protect against?
In my personal experience, customers can be trusted and hackers don't care about your software. For my own software I've implemented an extremely basic licensing system. I've collected data about how many unique mac addresses use each unique license, so I can count what licenses are used by multiple computers. I've just done a simple filter on all my licenses to see which ones are used by over 5 mac-addresses. I expected there to be more, but the result was 13. There are 13 licenses that are being used by more than 5 computers, none of those licenses are used by over 14 computers.
That's 13 out of about 3500 licenses mind you.
This is just my reality, maybe your target niche is script kiddies or broke CS students, consider your target group, but I suggest you not to worry too much about it, just implement a really basic licensing system to prevent no-effort abuse and you'll be fine.
- ukmar 10y agoExactly, I want to protect from multiple installation with one license. Do you have a server that you use for the licensing? How did you come up with such statistic? How do you handle if one client changes pc (MAC changes), does he really change pc?
- azeirah 10y agoI have a server, yes, every time someone starts up my application, it sends a request to my server to with a (LICENSE, MAC-ADDRESS) tuple, which I store. So far, I've never acted on MAC changes. If I saw a license that was used by say 50 MAC-addresses, I would disable it and send an email to the original buyer, scoff at him and give him a new license. But so far no-one has done this, not one person out of ~3500 has shared their license with a larger group of people. Just trust your users for now, collect some statistics if you're really concerned, and act if someone is really abusing your system. Don't ever go after ambiguous cases, ever. I made this mistake in the beginning, got many MANY false flags. I think collecting the statistics is a really good idea, because it will show you that your userbase is trustable, and you will change your perspective on software protection :)
- danieltillett 10y agoYou do realise crackers strip out your server request code. This is trivial to do. You really have no idea of how many people are using your program.
- azeirah 10y agoOh yeah true, but I know I can't project against that anyway, pirates gonna pirate, and I'm not against that. But tbf, I don't think there are any people who even bothered cracking my program...
- danieltillett 10y agoYou can, but it is not easy, simple, or very user friendly. It really depends on your market and software. For most software it doesn't make sense to bother with anything other than the most basic licensing system, but for some software it does. I sell quite a lot of software in China and India and I would not be able to do this unless I spent a lot of time and money on anti-cracking activities.