Software, as an intangible product, embodies the hard work of developers. However, software on open platforms has been plagued by piracy issues almost from the beginning. Pirates often cause software vendors to lose their investments. Most commercial software has adopted protection measures to prevent piracy. In the Internet era, software protection technology faces new challenges but also sees new opportunities.
Traditional Protection Methods
For traditional standalone software, software encryption can be achieved through both software and hardware methods. Since software encryption has certain limitations in combating debugging and tracing, it is now mainly used for low-strength encryption. Hardware encryption has evolved through several generations of products, from initial encryption using expansion cards with specialized computing functions, to software dongles, and then to software dongles with programming and anti-tracing capabilities, continuously improving. Moreover, the encryption strength of hardware encryption has always been stronger than contemporary software encryption technology.
The Internet Era - Pros and Cons of Openness
The Internet has brought tremendous impact to software distribution methods. The main trend is toward openness, which brings considerable difficulties to anti-piracy efforts. Sites that search for and download registration codes and provide pirated software have consistently been among the highest-traffic websites online. Due to the openness of the Internet and differences in laws between countries, eliminating piracy through the Internet is impossible.
The openness of the Internet has both disadvantages and advantages. The emergence of open source software has alleviated the piracy problem to some extent. Most importantly, commercial software publishers have also begun to use the Internet as a channel for distributing and protecting software. In addition to free patches and upgrade downloads, they also use license management software to sell software over the Internet.
License Management Software
SentinelLM from SafeNet is a typical license management software. Before software distribution, it is first processed by SentinelLM. A typical workflow is:
- Users download software from the software vendor's website
- After installation, the software establishes an association with certain characteristics of the machine, such as collecting hardware fingerprint information to generate a specific string
- After payment, users send the string back to the software vendor
- After confirming the legitimate user's identity, the software vendor generates a key string based on the user string and sends it to the user
- Users activate the software with the key string and begin using it
Using this method, software vendors can provide trial versions to users. After trying, if users find it suitable, they can purchase a license to remove time or functionality restrictions. When the number of users increases, they just need to increase the number of licenses.
The ASP Era - The End of Piracy?
The industry has reached a consensus that software provision and usage will move towards ASP. In the ASP era, computing and information storage will be centralized on powerful network servers, with client terminals only performing basic input/output tasks. At that time, software will be provided as a service rather than installed as a standalone product on each user's computer, thus eliminating the problem of software piracy.
However, at that time, users' data will be stored on service providers' servers, and several companies or departments may share the same software. In this situation, ensuring data independence and confidentiality is most important, so software protection issues mainly come down to identity authentication and identification, and encryption.
The Future of Identity Authentication
With the development and popularization of e-commerce, identity authentication has received increasing attention. In identity authentication, certificate security is crucial, and certificate issuance and custody are chosen by the CA. It is generally considered unsafe to send certificates over the Internet, so traditional methods such as postal mail are typically used.
The method of storing certificates is even more important. Storing on floppy disks or hard drives is considered unsafe. There are two relatively reliable methods: one is smart cards, and the other is USB interface products such as Rainbow's iKey and SmartKey. Compared to smart cards, SmartKey has the same functionality but with the advantages of being small, portable, and not requiring a card reader.
It can be imagined that in the ASP era, products like iKey and SmartKey for data protection and identity authentication will become mainstream, replacing the current position of dongles. Thus, the battle between spear and shield will enter a new cycle.
Source: Qin Gang, China Computer World Publishing Service Company