Thread: protecting my plugin

Hello,
I'm about to finish writing beta version of my first plugin. I am going to be very selective as to who uses it. I want to prevent any potential pirating (I know nothing is foolproof). Is there a way I can limit my code to run on a specific machine?

Someone mentioned using the,

mac address
ms win install guid
ip address
pc network name

to confirm the machine. Is there a function or header file that I should be looking into?


Daniel

( The scope of my knowledge is C++, the Maya API and rudimentary STL. )

Here is a nice list of ways to get a MAC address in C++.

Using the MAC address method is good, but it needs to be used in combination with remote authentication. If you do a comparison in your program, anybody can change the allowed MAC addresses. I recommend setting up a web server you have with a PHP script that takes the MAC address as a variable and outputs a 0 or 1 for if the MAC is allowed or disallowed (respectively). It takes a bit more work, and isn't totally secure (you could still remove that entire section, or change the jumps to their opposites), but it isn't as obvious. Any noobies will be prevented from using it

You might want to consider a comercial software protection such as Armadillo.
If you still want to do it yourself then here are a few more ideas:

• Hard disk serial number
• username/serial authentication
• CPU ID
• All mentioned Ideas combined.

Thank you guys for responding. I found sample code that retrieves CPU Id and it works beautifully.

http://www3.ccw.com.cn/club/essence/200305/13942.htm

This is probably the best solution for me because the code is short and sweet, it is easy to convert hex values to ints for a quick comparison and because I will be installing the plugins on computers that I have physical access to, I can easily custom compile the plugin for each computer.

If you know of any potential issues please let me know.

Daniel

Originally Posted by danielC++

If you know of any potential issues please let me know.

Daniel

Well if the user upgrades his machine with a new CPU your software will stop working.
Remember if you're just comparing the CPU ID with a value stored somewhere in your program this will be easily cracked but then again all software protection can be cracked.