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SoftwareShield™ FingerPrint Viewer

The SoftwareShield™ FingerPrint Viewer is a separate application that comes with SoftwareShield’s DRM Kit that you can simply copy to any machine as a single, stand-alone application (FingerPrintViewer.exe) and run to analyze your choice of FingerPrint flags in various environments, hardware configurations, settings and operating systems. Its features are also available internally in the SoftwareShield License Manager.

The SoftwareShield FingerPrint Viewer can be particularly helpful during design and development to help you determine what the best combination of FingerPrint flags are that you should use in your license for your particular situation and your target audience. It can also be helpful while debugging problems relating to possible FingerPrint errors.

What Are FingerPrints?

FingerPrinting (or Machine Locking) refers to a mechanism which SoftwareShield uses that will uniquely identify a particular computer by its various hardware, features, settings, serial numbers, memory address locations, characteristics, etc. This FingerPrint is optionally used in the communication of Activation Codes to your customers to ensure only the legitimate licensed users can use the codes you issue.

The FingerPrint of a machine is computed from a set of available options you specify. There are a variety of options that can be independently turned on or off. This effectively allows you to configure your license to use up to 8 million different combinations of algorithms for computing the systems FingerPrint. As well, if you have any particular algorithm of your own, the SoftwareShield System essentially allows you to plug it into the FingerPrint sub-system.

Benefits

There are many benefits to using the FingerPrint Viewer with SoftwareShield. Viewing FingerPrint values can be useful to you as the publisher when you are making the decisions regarding how to (if you choose to) Machine Lock your license. The FingerPrint Viewer allows you to inspect exactly what values are being interrogated on a machine to create the FingerPrint itself. It also allows you to see the generated FingerPrints themselves (which are cryptographically secure hashes of the output of the interrogation).

If you are uncertain how a particular configuration of machine will react internally to your choice of FingerPrints, you can simply copy the Viewer to the host machine, run it, set your FingerPrint Options Code and generate the output. This output can be saved for future reference, or forwarded to other developers for inspection. Run separately from SoftwareShield’s DRM kit allows you to take the FingerPrint Viewer into the field at a customer’s location if you need to field test or in some cases pre-configure a copy-protected license, or quickly test a variety of machine configurations in your testing process.

Save Development Time and Money

The SoftwareShield FingerPrint Viewer gives your team a critical internal view of the FingerPrint mechanism and precise control to fine-tune the FingerPrint options to include in your license. By using the FingerPrint Viewer during development, your skilled team saves valuable time. They can immediately inspect what effect their choices of FingerPrint options in their licenses will have on a wide variety of operating systems, environments and user permission levels.

Making better decisions sooner in the development cycle allows your team to implement a great solution the first time - saving time and money.

This control provides the best possible information for the developers as they make key security decisions that affect how the Activation Codes your organization generates and any Copy Protection options you include to be as secure as possible - for your unique situation and target market. This enhances your applications security.

Reduce Support

A bad decision about how to bind to the user’s machine can mean endless frustrating support issues and potentially angry customers.

The FingerPrint Viewer gives your team the control to include precisely the right information in the FingerPrint. If however a problem arises, since the viewer is highly portable, it serves as an indispensable tool for debugging potential FingerPrint issues.