Protecting your rev apps

[Gordon]

As a follow-up question - what about using the MAC
address of the network card on your computer. With
enough determination, this can be spoofed - and it
would mean that the app would require the presence of
a network card (but not an internet connection) to run
-  AND you'd need a new key to run your app if you
changed the network card - but no system is foolproof.


Gordon


--- Gordon <gwalias-rev at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Dear Revolutionaries
> 
> Is there any way to access something like a unique
> ID
> number for the computer currently running the rev
> app?
> 
> It is my understanding that Intel starting giving
> all
> CPUs a unique IDs a few years back, probably to help
> MS combat software piracy. I don't whether other
> chip
> makers do the same (AMD for example).
> 
> More generally, my question is:
> t
> Is there any way of obtaining or generating some
> kind
> of unique ID for an individual computer, for
> licensing
> purposes. I have read a lot of discussion in the rr
> archives about using crypto keys and hidden license
> files and so on. It seems like getting the CPU ID
> (perhaps through the Win API) would be like the best
> way to do it.
> 
> I had another idea for this - if you write files to
> a
> disk, the exact addresses and distribution of file
> fragments will arguably be unique on anything except
> a
> newly formatted disk. To get around even this
> limitation, what you could do is use a random number
> sequence to generate a whole bunch of random files
> of
> differing lengths and to delete a random subset of
> them and expand a random subset of the ones that
> remain by a random number of bytes. The remaining
> pattern of files on the hard drive would then act as
> a
> kind of digital signature that you make a digest of
> using their hardware addresses on the disk (sector
> and
> block numbers) and their random contents. Even if
> somebody copied all these files to another computer,
> their distribution on the new disk would not be the
> same and only by imaging the entire original hard
> drive and outputting the result onto another drive,
> could you reproduce this (unless you had access to
> your hard drive at the hardware level and could
> write
> bit sequences to specific sectors and blocks). You
> might even be able to make this tougher to do by
> incorporating the index of bad blocks for the
> original
> drive, into the digest. Could such a dsik drive
> fingerprint scheme be feasible (or maybe its already
> been done)?
> 
> Replies to my this and to my original question would
> be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Best
> 
> Gordon
> 
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