[ezekg]

Yes. What prevents cracking is the fact that license keys can only be created if you are either an authenticated user of the account or authenticated with a product API token. In order to create a license crack, you would have to obtain a valid API key for that specific account. Everything with the API is done over the wire, meaning there are no public/private keys within your app to crack.

[wyday]

I don't think you actually understand cracking if you're claiming your protection is uncrackable. You're certainly not the first licensing company to sell that lie, if that is what you're claiming. I can explain why what you just said is easily crackable if you'd like.

Spoiler alert: nothing can stop cracking (but that's not the point of licensing): https://wyday.com/limelm/features/why/

But I'll just give you the benefit of the doubt and say you didn't actually understand the question.

(Also, I'm certain I'll be downvoted for commenting on a competitor's product, but licensing companies that lie to customers is a particular pet peeve of mine).

[ezekg]

I didn't mean to claim that the product is uncrackable; I only meant that the API is secure and produces cryptographically sound tokens and license keys. Keygen does nothing to circumvent users from modifying a product's source code. It is only an API, and not a way to obfuscate an app; that's up to the discretion of the company/person developing the app.

There will always be ways to bypass licensing, especially for apps built on web tech, e.g. web apps, Electron apps, NW.js apps, etc. There are ways around it, sure. But that part isn't what Keygen is for. Keygen uses a combination of serial keys for licensing, as well as hardware-locked licensing by tracking machine fingerprints. It's up to the developer to enforce these, however.

Also, Keygen solves a very different problem that Nalpeiron, Lime LM, Agilis, Cryptlex, etc. do not solve: easy licensing for web-based apps. All of the solutions I've seen are cumbersome, unintuitive and are of course primarily designed for compiled apps. All of that has lead me (and others) to developing licensing systems in-house that behave more or less identically.

[NKCSS]

What Ubisoft did a few years ago with Settlers VII was to put required pieces of code in the DRM; e.g. without an internet connection, the software would not function at all; it took over a year and a lot of hard work before they found a way to write their own server to serve up the required bits, and it was just for that game, not a general solution.

[Nullabillity]

Then again, the servers were so poor that, for a long time, the game basically wouldn't function with a connection either.

[NKCSS]

True :) It was also very badly programmed, making your PC die in agony when you'd play it, even if you had the highest end stuff on the market. Still a very fun game though.

[KaiserPro]

a previous company I worked for spent many pound coins on using metafortress to make our softeare exceptionally difficult to crack.

It went from 5 minutes in a hex editor to being a rather involved job. So it stopped it for a while.

Then people realised that instead of cracking licensed program, it was much more simple to crack the license server. (this also made detection much harder.) It also had the advantage of allowing rafts of other software not made by us work as well.

[badlogic]

Hey! We've used limelm in our (now defunt product). Everything was a pleasure to use, both the client libs and the web frontend! That said, we obviously had to camouflage calls to the client lib and apply a few other tricks to make mocking out the calls harder. Great product!

[ryanlol]

Based on reading his posts here (site doesn't work), his product seems to be something you'd run on the server rather than on the customers side. Sounds like it does licensing for web applications, not for software that you download to your computer.

Doesn't sound very useful.

[Loic]

Your explanations are very nice. I have just one thing I am wondering. What if a customer is using something like VMWare to activate the product and then distribute in the company a VMWare image. Can your hardware based licensing scheme work?

[fla]

He means that if it's easy to patch the if(licence_valid) then the rest doesn't really matter.