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Posted by G H on April 10, 2007, 10:08 am
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>
>> >G H wrote:
>> >
>> >> Having trouble finding anything like this. My company wants to be
>> >> able
>> >> to
>> >> have me make software installation CDs that are locked to only working
>> >> on
>> >> a
>> >> specific laptop - keyed to the laptop's NIC MAC address. Does anyone
>> >> know
>> >> of a utility package that helps with this ?
>> >
>> > Counter-question: Why are you trying something that is obviously
>> > insecure?
>> > Either that or you're off-topic here (this is comp.*security*.misc).
>>
>> Our Users are almost all remote - and sometimes need software
>> installation
>> files. We want to be able to ship the User a CD with whatever software
>> they
>> need, but want to make sure they only install the software on the company
>> owned laptop. We were thinking that if there is a way to lock the CD to
>> the
>> laptop's MAC address - then it would only work on that laptop.
>
> Is this software your company has written?
>
> Or are you supporting remote users who need a variety of vendor
> supplied software that you're snail mailing CD's for?
>
> How many users are you supporting? License keys are generally the way
> this sort of piracy prevention stuff gets done. License keys that get
> validated with an internet site so that a given key can be used only
> once and validated against known users who've paid. If your userbase
> is small enough and cost of piracy large enough to have someone be
> able to deal with legit users needing to reinstall after a system
> rebuild, then perhaps that'd be a more effective deterrent, and less
> prone to support issues. When you do goofy hardware things like this,
> you will raise hte bar for the casual user, but not terribly high.
> Just takes one person to post on a forum "hey, it uses MAC
> address--spoof that, here's the workaround" to undo such a "security
> through obscurity" method.
>
>
> --
> Todd H.
> http://www.toddh.net/
This is for things like the different VPN clients (different ones for
different countries and domains) - (this comes up when a User transfers from
like Mexico to India), updated versions of productivity software (MS Office,
Photoshop, etc). We overnight (snail mail) the CD when downloading across
the Internet takes hours (over 6 hours for Office 2003), which the Users
cannot or will not wait around that long for downloading . Also keep in
mind that we've got Users that get confused by having to provide a strange
ID and password for the FTP site. We were changing the password routinely
so that the Users wouldn't be able to use the password for any length of
time. We can't stop Users from 'forgeting to ship back the CD' or simply
making a copy before sending it back.
License keys don't seem a solution as we only got 1 key when we bought 300
seats of MS Office 2003. When purchased bulk, they give a key thats limited
to 300 seats. Lets say we send out 100 CDs, each User installs the software
3 times each - and then when we go to use the key the 101st time, we get
told that we've exceeded the seat limit. When we call Microsoft, they are
able to list to us the 300 MAC addresses that go to the computers that our
key has been used on.
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