Why dongles?
In the continual fight against software piracy, many companies offer what they consider to be innovative software solutions. Very often these solutions are good deterrents, aiming to help prevent piracy and protect customers from software tampering, as well as easing the burden of software license management. However, even with new anti-piracy innovations, counterfeit detection and tamper-resistant features, software mechanisms to protect licenses and counter copy piracy, pale significantly in effectiveness when compared with the modern USB hardware key dongle. New dongle technologies such as battery-backed embedded real-time clocks and code-porting features put the software protection dongle in first place when it comes to near-perfect protection from software license abuse.
So what is a dongle?
The dongle is a software protection device that takes the shape of a small piece of hardware that plugs into a communications port (generally USB) on a computer and serves as an electronic "key" for a piece of software; the program will run only when the dongle is plugged in.
The purpose of the dongle is copy protection or authentication of software to be used on a system. In its most basic form, the dongle mostly appears as a two-interface security token with transient data flow that does not interfere with other dongle functions and a pull communication that reads security data from the dongle.
Dongles are used by proprietary software vendors as a form of copy protection or digital rights management, because it is far harder to "break" or "crack" a dongle than to misuse a "soft" licensing mechanism. Without the dongle, the software may run only in a restricted mode, or not at all.
Basic modern dongles, such as the Clave2 from Senselock Europe, include built-in strong encryption and use fabrication techniques designed to thwart reverse engineering. More advanced dongles also now contain non-volatile memory - key parts of the software may actually be stored and executed on the dongle. Thus advanced dongles are now essentially secure cryptoprocessors that execute inaccessible program instructions that may be input to the cryptoprocessor only in encrypted form. A comprehenseive range of modern dongles is the Elite EL family of dongles from Senselock Europe.
Recommended suppliers
For a complete range of dongles, including dongles based on EAL 4+ and EAL 5+ compliant smart chips, Senselock Europe is recommended. For more information, see the Senselock Europe page on this site, or click on the image below to find out more about the dongle trial evaluation kit from Senselock Europe.
