Hybrid Licensing and Dual Activation of Desktop software

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JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 10, OCTOBER 2010, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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Hybrid Licensing and Dual Activation of Desktop software

Sanjeev Kumar Biswas
Adobe Systems India P Ltd

Kanika Dalmia Gupta
Adobe Systems India P Ltd

Keywords: Software Rights Management, Licensing, Software Activation Abstract - The paper outlines a new holistic licensing and product activation strategy that can be used in the current market context for desktop software products. At present, the licensing models in use for software products suffer from numerous shortcomings. As a result of which, the product is easily pirated, has limited use models, restricted product purchase options, expensive auditing procedures and are unable to work in locked down environments with no internet connection. Using the proposed solution, the software vendors can take a shot at all these issues that are plaguing the software growth. The paper presents a method and system that takes advantage of the prevelant mobile technology like Smart Phones and feature phones. Using this, the software product vendors would be able to protect the software from piracy, increase the target customer base, provide greater flexibility to the end user in terms of more features/license duration, provide a smart and convenient way of handling all licensing and product purchase woes of the end user, and in turn promote the revenue growth. This software purchase, licensing and activation methodology is novel in its approach as it makes use of two most powerful communication channels – the internet and the mobile network, in tandem. The paper describes the system components and setup, communication protocol in use between different components, and the different use models.

1 INTRODUCTION
Software Licensing and Product Activation are being used by all software vendors to manage the rights of their software and prevent unauthorized usage of their product. The methods and systems in use presently use various licensing mechanism like using a product activation code (serial number), hardware dongle, internet based product activation, local license, etc. These methods though, are limited in nature and have borne the brunt of hacking attempts and product piracy. Software Piracy is one of the major threats in the software industry today. Unfortunately, a majority of the software users, either ignorantly or deliberately engage in software piracy. Whenever a user uses a piece of software that is unlicensed, he is depriving software companies of their earnings. More importantly, he is depriving the creative teams who have developed the software (e.g., programmers, writers, graphic artists) of compensation for the thousands of hours they have spent working on a particular program. Most of the commercially available software is pirated using easy licensing hacks, keygen generated serial number/product key, patching the licensing module of the software to bypass license check, bypassing internet based activation check, etc. User mindset towards not purchasing ‘expensive’ software

 

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 10, OCTOBER 2010, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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products also lead to use of pirated products. In addition to the retail users, piracy levels are also being reported for enterprise customers where the organizations massively over-use the purchase license. Thus, piracy is a huge bottleneck in the commercial success of the software products. The paper attempts to bring forth a new licensing system with an improved product activation strategy that will address these piracy concerns. The new system makes use of the widespread mobile network for providing added security and more user-friendly features. Apart from anti-piracy support, the proposed system provides new methodology for licensing a group of different products of a software company with a composite master license, licensing for user specified time period, licensing a sub-set of features of the product only, purchasing these new combinations from the product’s purchase server, etc. Let’s study the system in more detail now.

2 DETAILED DESCRIPTION
The new system for licensing and activation leverages the cell phone / mobile communication network in conjugation with internet connectivity, to provide the following features to the end-user – (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) Software Protection from license tampering and piracy Secure Recovery of the lost client license Licensing multiple products with a single purchase Generating limited period license as per user needs Licensing dynamic product feature set

To understand the functioning of the proposed system, let’s discuss the system design in detail.

2.1 SYSTEM DESIGN
In addition to the components used for supporting licensing and product purchase, our system uses a mobile phone – it may be a Smart Phone ( eg: Nexus, Android ) or a feature phone ( eg: Samsung, Nokia, Sony Erricson ). So the system consists of the following components: 1. Smart Phone / Feature Phone: A smart phone which is capable of installing an application or a feature phone with SMS capabilities. The cell phone will provide a new channel for validating the authenticity of the product’s license. 2. Mobile Application: The mobile application would be the interface to the end user. This application would be a mini license manager running on the user’s smart phone. The mobile application would list the available options to the user to manage his desktop products and their licenses. 3. License Server: This is the backend server that sends back a server generated license to the client when it receives an activation request. 4. Purchase Server: This server maintains the purchase transaction details of the client. Each transaction generates a unique ‘billing code’ and the list of features that are getting activated for the product. This information is stored in XML format in a backend database. The database is

 

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 10, OCTOBER 2010, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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used by both Purchase server and license server to synchronize the products / features that are activated. 5. SMS Server: This server keeps running at the backend and is used to get the request from the user’s cell phone and send back appropriate response to it. This is specifically used in the absence of internet connectivity, like locked down environments – government organizations, hospitals, etc. and when the user uses a feature phone to perform the licensing/purchase.

Fig 1: System Layout for Cell Phone based Licensing

The figure above shows how a desktop product interacts with the Cell phone and the internet to complete the licensing and purchase workflow.

2.2 KEY CONCEPT
The key concept behind this methodology is making use of the cell phone technology in tandem with the internet connectivity for improving product security and secure product activation and licensing. Mobile communication channels are very secure and are very ‘personal’ to a user. So, using cell phones for software protection is a pretty novel in its approach Consider the normal use case, the user installs the product on the client desktop PC. In addition to this, the user would also need to install the new mobile application on his/ her smart phone. Once both the desktop product and the mobile application are installed, perform a ‘Sync’ operation between the mobile and the user desktop. Now, the mobile phone and desktop are in sync to perform the various licensing and purchase workflows.

 

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 10, OCTOBER 2010, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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I Software Purchase and Activation
The mobile application on the user’s smart phone will have an option to purchase the software product. When the user clicks of the ‘Purchase’ option, the user is presented with the list of products he can purchase. On selecting one product, the mobile application sends a request to the purchase server using internet connection to get the unique billing code. The purchase server records the purchase transaction and sends back the billing code through the internet or through the SMS protocol of the mobile phone (in case of feature phones), back to the mobile application. As a result of this step, the user has the billing code in his cell phone for use later or for activating immediately through mobile. This billing code will be used as an additional parameter to validate the user license. Now, the activation can be performed though the internet connection initiated by the desktop product or through the mobile phone by selecting to activate in the mobile application. Cell phone Activation If the user prefers to activate through the mobile application, then the mobile app would sync with the desktop using the Bluetooth / USB data transfer / Infrared communication etc. to get the desktop machine ID. This machine ID is required to uniquely indentify the user machine associated with a particular product purchase and license. The machine ID is a unique number used for uniquely identifying a user desktop and is calculated using various hardware parameters. For a Smart Phone, a license activation request is sent to the License Server using the internet connection based on the billing code, IMEI number of the cell phone, Machine ID and the cell phone number. This data makes the request unique. If the user has a feature phone, the same request is sent via the SMS protocol. The License server validates the data received in the license activation request, creates a new license. The server then updates the licensing state of the product in the common database. The server generated license is then sent back to the cell phone. The cell phone application can maintain a “Master License” copy in its cache and deliver a copy of the license to the client. This will be used for supporting license recovery on the client.

 

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 10, OCTOBER 2010, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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1. Launch the product. The client Licensinf Library throws a UI, asking user to enter billing code 2 & 3 User opens up the Purchase App in his mobile 4 The Purchase App displays the list of products available for purchase, User can add selected products to shopping cart 5 & 6 The Purchase App communicates the Purchase to the Purchase Server and back 7 User makes a purchase, gets a ‘Billing Code’ There are two ways the billing code can be used : 8 Enter the Billing code manually in the product UI The product is ready to use Or 9 Pass the Billing code to the License App running in the mobile 10 & 11 The License app would communicate with the License Server 12 & 13 The License client would talk to the license server to activate the product

                   Fig 2: Sequence Diagram of the Purchase and Activation Workflow

 

 

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 10, OCTOBER 2010, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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             Add to Cart 

 

123243473875

             Billing Code 

          

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 10, OCTOBER 2010, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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The point to note here is that two more variables have been added to the activation request – one the unique billing code and the other is the IMEI number of the user’s mobile handset. 

II Hybrid licensing
Apart from supporting the full featured product with perpetual licenses, the software vendors can even aim at supporting limited period licenses or customized licenses based on the customer’s requirements. Here again, the mobile application can provide the user an interface to – i) ii) iii) Select the products that he wishes to buy/license For a given product, Select the feature set that he requires Select the time period or the duration for which the product should remain licensed

Based on all these inputs from the user, the mobile application can send a purchase request to the Purchase Server. The purchase server can then generate different pricing options for the client based on the business logic and register the product, features and duration details in the backend database and send back a billing code for the user. The user can then use the billing code to retrieve a license from the license server either by activating from the mobile or by entering the billing code in the desktop application. Either ways, the license server would return a hybrid license which would license the requested products with the requested feature set for the requested duration only. After the time period expires, the desktop product doesn’t run and prompts the user to perform a license recharge.

III Dynamic Recharge through Mobile Application
Another benefit of the proposed system is to provide the user a dynamic license recharge system on his mobile. There are many users that want to use the product for a short duration only and would rather not require the full feature set of the product. For such users, the mobile application can provide an option to recharge only a limited feature set of the product for a short period of time using the concept of Hybrid licensing. So the number of days for which the product is licensed and the feature set would be dynamic in the hybrid license returned by the license server.

 

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 10, OCTOBER 2010, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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Fig 3: Interactions between the Mobile Phone, Desktop & backend servers

Fig 4: Mobile Application – Hybrid License and Recharge WF

 

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IV License Recovery
A common problem associated with licensing is a ‘lost license’. Many a times, the user’s desktop gets formatted or the product installation is damaged. In other cases, the file system can get corrupted and the license file can get deleted. As a result of this, the client license and his activation is lost. The user is not able to use the product despite having paid for it. Buying another copy of the license is not an option for expensive software. The mobile application can provide an easy to use option to recover the lost license to a legitimate user only. The user can initiate the ‘recovery’ process by selecting the recover option in the mobile application. The mobile application maintains a master copy of the license in its cache. So when the user requests to recover the license, the mobile app syncs with the desktop to get the machine ID of the desktop. This machine ID is then matched with the machine ID in the master copy to see if the request for recovery is coming from the same machine or not. If the machine ID (Machine Identification Number) matches, then the mobile application dumps a copy of the master license on to the desktop, simulating a ‘Master-Slave’ kind of relationship. Another point to note is that the recovered license would only be valid for the remaining licensed period only.

 

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Thus, the use of mobile phones in the licensing and software purchase domain has opened up new avenues for safeguarding the software from piracy, in addition to providing flexible user friendly features.

3 EVALUATION OF CONCEPT
The licensing and purchase strategy elaborated in this paper has several advantages over the traditional models. Most of the traditional licensing schemes like online internet based activation, hardware dongle based activation, phone activation through customer care, serial number based licensing suffer from numerous drawbacks and can easily be by-passed by the product pirate. Introducing the ‘cell phone’ in this workflow, not only adds greater security and protection to the complete process of software licensing, but also verifies the legitimacy of the end user. The cell phone number and the handset can be uniquely identified, making it difficult for a user to hack the licensing workflow. The proposed system addresses the piracy concerns that every software company has. It exploits the untapped potential of the mobile network for performing an additional verification check. It is a simple method and with the advent of mobile applications on the Android, iPhone, etc, this method can quickly gain momentum and popularity.

 

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 10, OCTOBER 2010, ISSN 2151-9617 HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/ WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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Apart from anti-piracy, this method provides a new interface to the end user for managing the product licenses. The mobile application can provide varied options to generate a hybrid license for multiple products, a license for a short period of time or a license with only a limited feature set of the product. Using this interface the user can dynamically generate a license and pay for it, as per his requirements. This system can also provide valuable insight in the product usage metrics of the end user. The analytics data can be collected for different mobile users and identify the use pattern of different products. This data can be used for increasing the revenue from the software products. There are various advantages associated with this system. This cell phone based system can provide the infrastructure for supporting various subscription plans for offering the product for short term use. There are two verification paths for validating the authenticity of the user. Any kind of license file tampering can easily be detected by the system. Flexible licensing options can add value to the product and hence improve product sales. There is no prior art with respect to using mobile phones for performing desktop product purchase and licensing. In enterprise environment as well, the mobile based system can be used to keep track of the product activations and recover licenses in case of license deletion/corruption.

4 CONCLUSION
The concept and use model of “Hybrid Licensing and Dual activation” has been discussed and defined in this paper. This can be implemented in the software products with minimal change to the existing licensing technology in use. This use methodology will prove beneficial in terms of the additional revenue and safeguarding the product from software piracy. It can be used to get more users to actually purchase the license rather than use a pirated copy, by offering dynamic license options. Our analysis and proposal brings forth a new licensing and product activation methodology with respect to research in this domain. Most of the researchers in this field, propose internet based solutions or a hardware based validation scheme as a solution for tackling piracy. The prospective potential of the mobile network is relatively untapped in this domain of license validation and license management. The proposed system not only deals with piracy, but also provides a means to lure new customers by offering dynamic and flexible licensing schemes through the mobile application. Also the research in this paper opens up new avenues for achieving greater profits as well as greater security for desktop software.

5 REFERENCES
[1] Vidyanand Choudhary, “Software as a Service: Implications for Investment in Software Development” Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences – 2007 [2] Daniel Ferrate, “Software Licensing Models – Whats out there ?”, IT Professional , Volume 8, Issue 6. [3] S.Manoharan, Jesse Wu “Software Licensing – A classification and Case study” Department of Computer Science, University of Aukland. [4] Dewan, R. M. and M. L. Freimer, “Consumers Prefer Bundled Add-Ins,” Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 20 No. 2, Fall 2003 [5] Dewan, R., B. Jing and A. Seidmann, “Product Customization and Price Competition on the Internet,” Management Science, Vol. 49, No. 8, pp. August 2003 [6] Konary, A., S. Graham, and L. Seymour, “The future of software licensing: Software Licensing under Siege”, IDC White Paper, March 2004

 

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