|
 |
|
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 23 available options. Each one can be independently turned on or off. This effectively allows you to configure your license to use up to 8388608 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. The FingerPrint Viewer™The FingerPrint Viewer™ is a utility program that allows you to inspect intermediate and final FingerPrint values. Its features are also available internally in the SoftwareShield License Manager, but used as a stand-alone application (FingerPrintViewer.exe) it can be run on any machine - even where the SoftwareShield SDK is not installed. This allows you to take the program into the field at a customers 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. Viewing FingerPrint values can be useful to you as the developer when you are making the decisions regarding how and 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 allow 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. |
