Tag: software licensing solutions

Consumption based software licensing offline

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Licensing software that will run in an offline environment is more challenging, specifically in cases where one needs a certain response from the server (for example, to activate a new devices or record usage). However, it tends to be a real problem when changes need to be recorded fast, which occurs in the floating license model and pay-per-use model).

A few days ago, we introduced support floating license that can work offline using our license server. Today, we would like to introduce the new release of the license server that supports the pay-per-use model offline.

How it works

Instead of contacting our server to record usage, the license server will, on a regular basis, write down all the updates to a data object to disk. Each time an update is written, we will use your public-key to encrypt it along with the previous encrypted block (if you want to learn more about how it works, please check out ‘asymmetric encryption’ in this article). Since the public key is used, there is no way to see what information has been recorded, and because each update is encrypted with the previous update, once it is on disk, there is no way to tamper with the usage (assuming the client has not backed up the previous version). And even if a client would be able to tamper with this file, it may still be detected by our AI anomaly detection module. In addition to the collection of usage information, if your clients send you these files regularly, you may be able to detect any tampering with their local clock.

You can read more about our protocol on the following page: https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/937. The implementation can be found in the following repository: https://github.com/Cryptolens/license-server.

As always, if you would have any questions, please reach out to us at [email protected].

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Introducing reseller portal for software licensing

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Since the end of last year, we have made the reseller portal generally available for all users. We would like to thank all our beta customers for their feedback during the development process.

Idea

The goal behind the reseller portal is to allow you to delegate license issuance rights to other users. This can be your resellers/distributors, IT-admins of your customers or your employees. In other words, “reseller” can be any user that should only be able to create specific amount of new licenses based on a pre-defined template.

The reseller portal also introduces new logging capabilities. All events related to new licenses, customers, etc, are stored in the object log. Thanks to this log, you can, for instance, bill your resellers or customers only when they have successfully created a new license.

Getting started

Once you have created a new account, the reseller portal will be available in the top menu. If you are an existing customer, you can enable it on the billing page. As the next step, we recommend to check out the wiki page for more information.

Please let us know if you have any questions 🙂

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Metered usage with Stripe recurring billing in software licensing

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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 🙂

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Sign up customers automatically for the customer portal

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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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Data collection for better insights in software licensing

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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.

Inside the app, it can be called as shown below:

AI.RegisterEvent("access token with RegisterEvent permission", 
    new RegisterEventModel { EventName = "start", FeatureName = "YearReportGenerator", Key= "AAAA-BBBB-CCCC-DDDD", MachineCode = Helpers.GetMachineCode(), ProductId = 3,
    Metadata = Helpers.GetOSStats() });

When a transaction has occurred, we can send a GET request to the url below. The only difference is that we have provided a “value” and a “currency”.

https://app.cryptolens.io/api/ai/RegisterEvent?token=<access token with RegisterEvent permission>&Value=30&Currency=USD&ProductId=3&MachineCode=<machine code>

The complete tutorial is available here. As always, let us know if you have any questions 🙂

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Support for any number of features

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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:

["ModuleA", ["ModuleB", ["Submodule 1", "Submodule 2"]], "ModuleC", ["ModuleD", ["ModuleD1", ["Submodule D1", "Submodule D2"]]]]

Set up

Defining features

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

It’s defined with the following feature template

["ModuleA", ["ModuleB", ["Submodule 1", "Submodule 2"]], "ModuleC"]

Assigning features

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

Helpers.HasFeature(license, "ModuleB.Submodule 1")

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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Automating offline activations

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Many times your customers may have either restricted internet access or no internet access at all. Although Cryptolens is a cloud-based licensing solution, you can still use it to protect offline devices. In this post, we cover three ways internet access can be restricted and how license key verification can be performed.

Periodic internet access

If your users are connected to the internet on a regular basis, we can cache the response from the “Activate” method each time we are able to contact the server. If, at some point, internet connection would not be present, we would fallback on a cached version of the license object.

When using this approach, it’s important to define how long time your users can be offline. There is a field called “SignDate” in the license key object, which is the time when the response was signed by the server (i.e. the last time you successfully called Activate). So, if you only want to allow your users to be offline for 30 days, you can compare the current date with the “SignDate”.

License server (re-routing)

If your users have certain devices that have no direct internet access, one option is to use a license server, which will re-route all requests through a server hosted by the user. Only the server has internet access.

There is currently a Windows version of the server, freely available on GitHub.

Air gap (no internet)

If the devices have no internet access at all, we can use a similar idea that was described in periodic internet access, with the only difference that we always fallback on the license file.

In Cryptolens, there are three ways you can create such a file:

In the dashboard

Next to each license key, there is a yellow button which can be used to create license files:

Using activation forms

Activation forms allow your customers to download activation files themselves.

Using the API

If you want to automate license file creation, you can either call the Activate method using one of our client APIs or call the Web API directly (eg. using curl).

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Python code for software licensing

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Update 2019-12-04: We have updated the Python library so that it’s easier to obfuscate. Please check out the latest article with tips on monetizing Python applications (it covers code obfuscation, license verification and accepting payments).

Today, we released a library for license key verification in Python, freely available on GitHub. The code below checks license validity with the server (performing all the necessary cryptographic checks under the hood). Please run “pip install licensing” before running the code below.

from licensing.helpers import Helpers
from licensing.models import Response, RSAPublicKey
from licensing.methods import Key

pubKey = "<RSAKeyValue><Modulus>sGbvxwdlDbqFXOMlVUnAF5ew0t0WpPW7rFpI5jHQOFkht/326dvh7t74RYeMpjy357NljouhpTLA3a6idnn4j6c3jmPWBkjZndGsPL4Bqm+fwE48nKpGPjkj4q/yzT4tHXBTyvaBjA8bVoCTnu+LiC4XEaLZRThGzIn5KQXKCigg6tQRy0GXE13XYFVz/x1mjFbT9/7dS8p85n8BuwlY5JvuBIQkKhuCNFfrUxBWyu87CFnXWjIupCD2VO/GbxaCvzrRjLZjAngLCMtZbYBALksqGPgTUN7ZM24XbPWyLtKPaXF2i4XRR9u6eTj5BfnLbKAU5PIVfjIS+vNYYogteQ==</Modulus><Exponent>AQAB</Exponent></RSAKeyValue>"

res = Key.activate(token="WyIyNTU1IiwiRjdZZTB4RmtuTVcrQlNqcSszbmFMMHB3aWFJTlBsWW1Mbm9raVFyRyJd",\
                   rsa_pub_key=pubKey,\
                   product_id=3349, key="ICVLD-VVSZR-ZTICT-YKGXL", machine_code="test")

if res[0] == None:
    print("An error occured: {0}".format(res[1]))
else:
    print("Success")

You can find more information the parameters, etc here.

Cryptolens joins Stripe partner program

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Most people today don’t know that only three percent of GDP is online. That’s why we’re
excited to join the Stripe Partner Program to increase internet commerce and help
companies start, run, and scale their businesses.

By joining the program, our mutual customers will now benefit from the combination of
Cryptolens secure licensing platform with Stripe’s seamless payments platform.

We believe that removing barriers to online commerce helps more new businesses get
started, levels the playing field, and increases economic output and trade around the
world. Together with Stripe, our mission is to bring more commerce online and increase
the GDP of the internet.

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