A common way to distribute functionality is by creating an SDK that can be consumed by developers inside their own application. The advantage of shipping functionality as an SDK is that you can focus on improving the core algorithms without the need of creating a separate GUI for a specific use-case.
Cryptolens already offers a way to protect SDKs and today we would like to introduce a new way that was specifically developed for .NET libraries that are permanently offline or where a perpetual licensing model is preferred.
How it works
The idea behind the new SDK licensing technique is to require developers to sign the application that will use your SDK with a special utility. When this is done, a new file with the certificate will be created in the same folder, which can later be verified when the SDK is called. This ensures that only authorised developers can develop applications that use your SDK.
Inside the SDK, you only need to call Helpers.VerifySDKLicenseCertificate() with your RSA public key, and it will make sure that the certificate is valid. A nice feature of this method is that it also returns a LicenseKey object, which you can use to decide which features should be available, etc. You can see a demo of this here.
In order to sign an assembly, developers can use a special utility that is available open-source on GitHub. Developers need to provide their license key and the assembly signing utility will automatically send their machine code so that you can control which developer machines can perform the signing operation.
Getting started
To get started, please check out the tutorial for SDK developers on the following page. All the helper tools and demo projects are available open-source in our GitHub repo.