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FlexLM is still going "strong" and used to encumber many scientific pieces of software widely used. It's exactly as you describe and incredibly user hostile --
by azalemeth 4y ago
FlexLM is still going "strong" and used to encumber many scientific pieces of software widely used. It's exactly as you describe and incredibly user hostile -- albeit somehow the "best" DRM scheme out of many bad options in a space that often includes hardware dongles like iLok. It's incredibly frustrating to e.g. pay >$1m for a piece of kit and get a DRM encumbered UI for it, deliberately designed to make life awkward.
Of course, the obvious issue with the public key approach listed as being "best" in the article is that all it takes for an attacker to overcome the scheme is to replace your private keys with theirs -- or to patch a JMP for every do_license_check() call in the binary. It's fundamentally an approach that is always hackable.
- justinjlynn 4y agoIndeed. If you're selling a 1MM piece of scientific equipment, then that's the dongle.
- gruez 4y ago>all it takes for an attacker to overcome the scheme is to replace your private keys with theirs -- or to patch a JMP for every do_license_check() call in the binary. It's fundamentally an approach that is always hackable. That might be true in theory, but is non-trivial in practice. The code responsible for license verification is often obfuscated and tied to critical functionality, so you can't do a simple find and replace.
- angry_moose 4y agoAlso its still massive in anything that's licensed by the CPU core - FEA/CFD type stuff (1 license = 1 core; 16 licenses = 16 cores). I never enjoy seeing FlexLM, but I absolutely dread seeing the homebrew license servers from companies that choose not to use it.