How To Create License Key For A Software In Vb6 Tutorial Visual Basic

Can you provide your definition of a serial key and how it is expected to be used. Also please indicate which version of Visual Studio.

• Introduction Software copy protection is a never-ending topic among developers. While it is true that perfect software copy protection is almost a dream given today's operating system and hardware infrastructure, if you are careful and use the right tools and techniques you can achieve a good degree of protection for your applications.

Background This article does not teach you to reinvent the wheel and implement your own copy protection techniques from scratch. Instead, it teaches you the basic principles of copy protection, and then it shows how to efficiently use free (or very cheap) tools such that you can achieve a decent degree of copy protection for your.Net applications with zero or few investments. Complete working samples written in both C# and VB.NET are attached to this article. Step 1: Implement correct license management License management is the most important aspect of making money out of a software application. Only you or your company should be able to generate license keys, and you must be able to enforce using each license key on one computer (or a number of computers that you choose).

Many developers resort to hiding an obscure key generation and validation algorithm into the application, or encrypting a license key with a symmetrical encryption algorithm, and then hiding the encryption/decryption key into the application for license key decryption and validation. These methods are incorrect and weak, and if a malicious party is really interested in your application the decryption keys or decoding/encoding algorithm will be extracted from your application in a matter of days since release.

License Key Generation Using Digital Signature Algorithms The correct way to generate license keys is to use digital signatures and public/private key encryption. The problem is that the RSA algorithm is not suitable for this. The library that I have successfully used for my licensing needs is SoftActivate Licensing SDK (from ). Unfortunately it is not completely free, but it is quite cheap compared to others which charge you an arm and a leg for the same functionality. This library generates digitally signed license keys using Eliptic Curve Cryptography (why ECC and not RSA? Because with RSA, the generated license keys would be waay to long - like hunderds of characters long).

Ca call accounting software download. What does this mean? It means that there is one encryption key for license key generation and signing (which is NOT embedded in the application - it is only used at your company for generation), and a separate decryption key for digital signature verification of the license key (which is embedded in the application, but cannot be used to generate license keys, just to validate them).

So even if a malicious party reverse engineers the application, they cannot generate license keys on your behalf. Software Activation Ok, we have the license key generation covered, but how to make sure that each license key is used on only one computer? This is where software activation comes into play. Software activation essentially means 'locking' each license key to only one or a maximum number of computers (most of the time via a Hardware Id). How is software activation accomplished?

Usually, this involves your application sending the license key and hardware id of the computer on which it runs, to a licensing server. The licensing server checks if the license key is valid and how many hardware id's have been sent for this key until now (this is referred to as the number of previous activations). If the number of previous activations is lower than a certain limit, an activation key is generated by the licensing server (using the same ECC algorithm and private key used for license key generation) which takes into account the received hardware id, and then this activation key is sent to the customer's application. From this moment on, at every startup (and optionally at random times during the application execution for added security) the application checks if the activation key is valid in conjuncation with the current hardware id, and the check is made with the same public key used for license key validation. If all is ok (activation key digital signature is valid, and the hardware id matches), the application continues. If not, it exits or asks the user to activate the application.