Summary

How do you allow for a more flexible license key that will maintain its validity when a hardware component is changed?

Question

For example, we are experimenting with generating vendor defined host IDs that look like the following: da8e-e510-6e14-f0aa-63b2-c824-9df2-5eb4. This vendor defined host IDs is composed of the hashes of various pieces of hardware attributes from the machine. We would like to avoid requiring an exact match in case the user changes a single hardware component.

I was thinking I could use the lc_set_attr function along with the LM_A_REDIRECT_VERIFY parameter and provide a function that would do the comparison for me. But there isn't any documentation on what the LM_A_REDIRECT_VERIFY flag does, or if there is a function that is called when the comparison is performed.

I'm aware of trusted storage and know that it is a possible solution to this problem. But our software is being installed in environments with strict network restrictions due to the extremely sensitive nature of their IP. We have no guarantee that these machines will be attached to a network, and if they are attached to a network we have very little guarantee that they will even be able to communicate on the internet.

Unless trusted storage can work without internet access I'm not sure it's viable.

Answer

Trusted storage (TS) is our solution for this type of use case (via Binding). Internet access has never been a requirement for TS; you would just use manual or short-code activation (instead of programmatic activation) to correspond between the back office and client/server.