A year ago, we released the recurring payment module to the customer dashboard, which allows your customers to sign up for plans and instantly receive the license key.
This has now been extended with the option to record usage in addition to the subscription fee. It is quite useful if you offer some features on a usage-based basis (eg. yearly report generation in an accounting software). It can also be used to to charge for API calls or other types of method calls.
In .NET, usage can be tracked with a one line of code:
var res = Subscription.RecordUsage(auth, new RecordUsageModel { Amount = 1, ProductId = 3349, Key = "CMXKC-GUQRW-EJUGS-RRPUR" });
It quite easy to get started. Please check out this article for more information. You always welcome to reach out to us should you have any questions 🙂
A recent addition to the platform is the ability to sign up customers automatically to the customer portal. Instead of creating a customer manually or through the API, you can publish a generic link that will automatically register a customer with your account. This link can be found on the customer page.
In addition to allowing your customers to see their current licenses, the customer portal gives them the option to order new licenses as well as use their login credentials instead of the license key when unlocking your software. We will cover each case below.
Why customer portal?
Listing licenses
When you assign licenses to a customer account, your customers will be able to see all their licenses and their properties, such as the set of features they are entitled to and when they expire.
Recurring payments
If you have set up Stripe with your account, you can allow your customers to sign up for a plan in the customer portal and get instant access to a valid license key. They can also easily manage their subscriptions. You can read more about how you can get started here.
User account authentication
Instead of using a license key, you can allow your customers to authenticate using their login credentials. Cryptolens has developed a state-of-the-art protocol that preserves the privacy of your customers (more information about the protocol can be found here). You can read more on how to get started here.
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We are happy to announce that we are now part of the GitHub Student Pack. While you are student, you can have up to 10 licenses with any number of end users for free. To activate the student benefits, you can visit the link below:
It’s not uncommon nowadays to see people with a smartwatch, be it Apple Watch or another brand such as Garmin. I think there are many advantages of using one; to me, it’s about keeping track of exercises in the gym as well as other parameters such as stress and sleep.
Many smartwatches record a wide range of data points: puls, movement, altitude and location. This amounts to large amount of data, which can be used to infer various things about the individual. Therefore, it’s important to keep this data safe.
In this post, I would like to share the security issue in the Android version of the Garmin Connect app and list several tips on how this can prevented when you work with sessions in your projects.
Background
When developing an application that requires user authentication, most of the time one needs the state to persist so that users don’t need to enter the username or password each time they visit a new page. Sessions can help us to accomplish that. Using sessions is less secure than asking for credentials all the time, but it’s trade-off that most of us can accept.
The issue
Before we start: I have confirmed with Garmin that they have fixed the issue before publishing this post.
Early in April last year, I changed my password to Garmin Connect on their website. I was already logged in into the Android version of the Garmin Connect app with my old password and my expectation was that the app would ask me to re-authenticate at some point. But, it did not. I cannot tell how long the session would persist, but I could keep using the app for several weeks with the old session.
The problem with such a long session duration is that it gives users a false sense of security when they change their password. For example, imagine that the user had a weak password at some point and an adversary was able to login and obtain a new session. Even if the user would have changed the password later, an adversary would still have access to their health data.
If this problem would have occurred in, let’s say, the Neftlix app, I would not be as worried, but since Garmin Connect stores large amounts of health data, I felt like that the consequences of a potential breach could be huge.
Proposals
After filing this security concern to Garmin, I proposed the following changes:
Make sure that sessions are reset everywhere (especially in the android app) during a password reset (or at least offer the user the choice of selecting this option on the website)
Time-limit the sessions on the mobile devices
Enable two-factor auth for each account
Conclusion
To sum up, whenever you have to persist a state, make sure that sessions expire at some point and that users have the option to log out from all devices. It’s always a trade off between security and convenience, so when you decide the session length etc, you need to take into account the impact of a potential breach, etc. In some cases, you can require users to re-authenticate if the operation is highly sensitive.
When developing apps, you will likely need to store some metadata. This can either be specific to a certain user or be shared among all users.
Data objects offer an easy way of managing metadata either on the product, license key or machine code level. They are quite useful since it’s easy to change them as your application evolves and user-specific data will stay the same across all devices.
In this article, we will cover data objects associated with a product.
Editing metadata
To add or edit data objects on the product level, you can click on the Data Objects link as shown below:
On the next page, you can either add or edit existing data objects. The names are case-sensitive and duplicates are not allowed.
Retrieving metadata on app start
Let’s assume our application needs to obtain the currently supported DOTNET_RUNTIME (which we defined in the previous step). This can be accomplished with the code below (the project files are available here).
To get it up and running, we need to specify an access token and modify the ReferencerId. The access token needs to have the “ListDataObjects” permission checked and we also strongly recommend to specify the product it should work with. The ReferencerId should be the Id of the product.
var systemSettings = Data.ListDataObjects("access token", new ListDataObjectsModel
{
ReferencerType = DataObjectType.Product,
ReferencerId = 3349, // <- the product id
});
if(!Helpers.IsSuccessful(systemSettings) || systemSettings.DataObjects == null)
{
Console.WriteLine("Could not retrieve the settings.");
}
var settings = systemSettings.DataObjects.ToDictionary(x=> x.Name, x => x);
if(settings.ContainsKey("DOTNET_RUNTIME"))
Console.WriteLine(settings["DOTNET_RUNTIME"].StringValue);
What’s next?
In the future tutorials we will describe how you can store user specific information. In meantime, let us know if you have any questions 👍
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In the beginning of the year, we looked at licensing for Autodesk AutoCAD. Today, we are announcing support for another Autodesk product, Maya. Similar to AutoCAD, Maya allows you to develop plug-ins, and in this post we are going to cover how licensing works if you plan to sell them.
Adding software licensing library
Maya supports Python 2 for plugin development. To add license verification, only two things are necessary:
By default, Cryptolens logs most of the requests made to the Web API. This information can give some basic insights into how the application is being used. In the latest release of the platform, we have expanded the list of methods that are being logged.
However, API logs don’t capture all events that could be useful from an analytics standpoint. For example, it won’t tell you the most popular feature, OS or answer questions such as which OS brings in most revenues. As a solution, we have released a new API method that allows you submit additional data, in .NET referred to as AI.RegisterEvent (you can also call the RegisterEvent Web API method directly).
The idea is that this method is called in two ways: inside the app (to track when a certain feature is used) and on the backend (upon a successful transaction.
To make it easier to create licenses of a common type, we have introduced a new feature called license template. In short, it’s a way to save license configurations (eg. features, set time, maximum number of machines) so that they can be re-used later.
It’s quite easy to get started. To save a license configuration, you can click on Save as Template button on the key creation page. This will re-direct you to a new page where you can provide a name for that configuration. Next time you want to generate a license from this configuration you can select it in the drop down list and click on Create button next to it.
We are always happy to hear your feedback or help you in case you have any questions 🙂
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A common request we have received from our customers is to support more than 8 features. Until now, the recommended approach has been to use the notes field or data object fields to store any additional feature information. With this update, the dashboard and several of our clients have built in support for additional features.
In addition to being able to define any number of features, we have also made it possible to define feature hierarchies. For example, we can define the following feature hierarchy:
Now, suppose the user opens ModuleB. With the above setup, we can either check if they have permission to use ModuleB or we can be more specific and require Submodule 1 to be present.
We will go through in more detail how you can get started later in the article. The feature template used for our above example is shown below:
Let’s suppose we want to define the following feature hierarchy:
To define it, we can use a JSON array structure shown below:
["ModuleA", "ModuleB", "ModuleC"]
Suppose now that we want to add sub features to ModuleB. For example, Submodule 1 and Submodule 2. To do that, we introduce a new array instead of the string “Module B”, which has the following structure:
["Module B", ["Submodule 1", "Submodule 2"]]
The first element defines name of the module, and the second element should ways be a list of submodules.
We can keep adding submodules to submodules in a similar fashion.
To add your feature template to a product, you can click on Edit Feature Names on the product page and then scroll down until you see Feature Template.
In the example above, we would get the following feature hierarchy
Once you have defined the feature template, the page to create a new license key and to edit existing one will have a box that allows you to define them, as shown below. The state will be stored in a data object with the name cryptolens_features, which we will cover in the next step.
Verifying features
At the time of writing, the Java client supports checking these additional features out of the box. You can do that using a special version of Helpers.HasFeature() method. For example, to check if Submodule1 is present, you can type
If you only want to check if ModuleB is present, without being specific, you can insteadwrite
Helpers.HasFeature(license, "ModuleB")
Plan ahead
Support for additional features is a fairly new feature so we would be grateful if you could report any errors or suggestions to us. At the time of writing, the Java client supports this out of the box. We plan to ship this to our other client libraries, starting with .NET. If you would like us to focus on a specific client library, please let us know.
As always, let us know if you have any questions 🙂
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Cryptolens offers different ways to analyse usage data. The standard analytics portal uses information generated when licenses are verified, which allows you to get insights where your users are located, when they use the application, etc.
There also an option to send in more data, which will give better insights about how different modules are used. We will cover this in this post.
Sending in data
To register an event, you can call the RegisterEvent method. Most of the parameters are optional, but it’s useful to at least supply a FeatureName and either Key or MachineCode. If you just have one product, ProductId is not necessary, but it’s useful if you have multiple products.
Cryptolens always needs to be able to link usage data to a unique user to give better results. The code snippet below can be used to register event, in our case that the user started YearReportGenerator module.
If you are using any other environment, the same can be accomplished with with a GET request as follows:
https://app.cryptolens.io/api/ai/RegisterEvent?token=<access token with RegisterEvent permission>&Value=30&Currency=USD&ProductId=3&MachineCode=<machine code>
More details about what information can be sent is available here.
Retrieving data
If you would like to analyse the data yourself, you can use GetEvents method to retrieve it. However, it’s also possible to get visual representation on the this page. The GUI is continuously improved, so if you have any feedback, you are more than welcome to get in touch. Below are several screenshots. The first image shows the summary of all the features:
The second image below shows event distribution:
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