USB Flash Drive Software Protection

September 14, 2007 8:08 AM

My company sells commercial software. We would like to make our solution available on a USB flash drive. I'm looking for manufactures/solutions that can help us solve our problems . . .

Ideally, we want to know the following on insertion of the drive into a system
1. Is the USB drive ours? That is, does it have an internal device ID or serial number that we can recognize.
2. Our product is serialized, we need to identify that the USB stick has our license on it along with licensing "options" that tell us Serial Numbers and different ways that the program can operate.

I'm looking for hardware/software solutions that can help make this happen. Any thoughts?

posted by dhacker to technology (7 comments total)

I do know someone who does custom software who uses a USB "Hardware key" which must be on the computer for his software to run. I don't think the USB key in question has storage.
posted by JMOZ at 8:23 AM on September 14, 2007

I don't know if this is the brand he uses, but does this item solve the problem?
posted by JMOZ at 8:24 AM on September 14, 2007

iLok is a standard USB copy protection dongle "standard" for some digital audio applications.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:37 AM on September 14, 2007

For clarity, we don't want to "protect" our hard drive resident application with a dongle. We want to run the software from the dongle itself.

Does that make a difference?
posted by dhacker at 9:24 AM on September 14, 2007

Let me clarify again - we want to ship the software on the USB drive - not on a CD. If the user plugs the USB drive into the computer we will do an install. We need the USB drive to have an encrypted area that we can write to which would hold serial numbers and options.
posted by dhacker at 9:26 AM on September 14, 2007

No idea about the software side, but I can quote you for manufacturing. Email's in profile.
posted by omnidrew at 10:05 AM on September 14, 2007

We need the USB drive to have an encrypted area that we can write to which would hold serial numbers and options.

Perhaps you could contact the iLok folks to see if they have a product which includes free storage with the key area.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:05 PM on September 14, 2007