Solidshield Activation
Overview
Solidshield Activation is the licensing solution based on machine binding. Protected binaries are common to every end-user, but to run they require an unlock token that depends on an hash of hardware they are run on.
Use cases
Example use-cases for Solidshield Activation:
- Online/offline software activation for licensing and sales tracking
- Deploy safe hardware-bound exhibition / demo versions of your software
- Track how many units a supplier/integrator is activating, providing per-production batches of serial numbers
- Keep software of a system fully secured against supply-chain attacks: confidentiality and integrity is assured from shipment to on-site deployment
Introduction
On the first run of the software on a new machine, the protected application will prompt for an unlock token.
Once the unlock token is present, the software will always run on the machine. If one of the key hardware components used to calculate the hardware-id is replaced, the software will prompt for a new unlock token.
The list of key hardware components can be customized.
The activation process can happen:
- Interactively, with a GUI-driven end-user flow, connecting to a local/remote activation server,
- Automatically, silently connecting to a local/remote activation server,
- Programmatically, providing the unlock token file, directly.
Activation servers setup
Solidshield hosts its own redundant architecture of activation servers, but can supply both the server and the key generator utility, so resulting backing architecture can be:
- Solidshield hosted activation servers, requiring Internet connection
- Solidshield USB activation server, local USB-form factor server, secured by chain-of-trust
- Privately hosted activation servers, either in Internet or local connection
- Custom scheme, using of Solidshield key generator utility
To identify activating users, Solidshield Digital Rights Management can be configured to use:
- Serial numbers or IDs
- Username / password pairs.
Supported targets
- ELF x86-64
- ELF x86
- PE x86-64
- PE x86
- Java ELF x86-64
- Java ELF x86
- Java Windows x86-64
- Java Windows x86
Technical details
Protection parameters
Run-time parameters
| Environment variable | Description |
|---|---|
| SLD_UNLOCK_TOKEN_PATH | Path pointing to the directory where a valid Solidshield unlock token file exists and is named as <ProductId>.ske |
Error Exit codes
| Exit Code | Description |
|---|---|