[ale] Unique number

Christopher Fowler cfowler at outpostsentinel.com
Thu Dec 30 13:43:49 EST 2004


My software includes C, Perl, and Java Enterprise.  So we are dealing
with a few languages.  In the past on our embedded devices I created a
64bit number that consisted of the following info:

1.  Date Created
2.  Tpye
3.  ETH0 Mac Address

That data was also blowfish encrypted and stored on parts of flash that
were raw and not an FS.  At boot time the data was placed in a shared
memory segment and each program that was ours would access that segment
to verify that is was in fact our stuff.  Since this was pure C i was
not concerned about the code being readable. 

My problem with perl is that the source program can be modified to skip
those checks.  One obvious solution would be to modify the perl binary
itself so that those pieces of code we wrote could not be ran without
our perl binary but hell that is against the perl license and still the
perl program can be modified.  How would one go about keeping someone
from reading a perl program and/or modifing it?


On Thu, 2004-12-30 at 13:32, George Carless wrote:
> Christopher,
> 
> In case it may be of any interest to you, you might wish to take a look 
> at http://www.x-formation.com/, which is the Web site for my copy 
> protection/license management company (rather at odds with the Linux 
> ethos, I know, but there we go...) -- our software provides a number of 
> means by which you can lock an application to a particular server, as 
> well as numerous other licensing parameters such as limiting the number 
> of machines on which an application can run simultaneously, etc.  
> 
> We're still in the process of completing the Linux version of LM-X, but 
> expect it to be finished within perhaps six weeks, so depending upon 
> your deployment timeframe it might be something that would be of 
> interest to you.  Just let me know if I can be of any assistance.
> 
> Cheers,
> --George



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