Serial Number and Registration

[scriptx]

Hello Everyone,

I have a little program which I want to put some limitations on. I never thought having a serial number could be so hard or preventing people from installing on more than one system can be such a daunting task. Anyhow, basically my program will have full access to internet and can contact a server to verify the serial number. I am just not sure what the standard procedures are for assigning serial numbers, registering a software and how to tie it with a specific system hardware, or how to securely authenticate the serial number.

Any feedback will be appreciated.

[dlite922]

When they pay you, you give them a serial number (usually randomely generated)

Your software should connect to your (secure) server and provide the serial number you gave them. Compare with your database, if there is a match (company/name matches serial number) then return successful, otherwise return with error that serial number is incorrect.

If it returns error, your software should not allow the user to continue to use it.

By the way, do you have your code encoded and obfuscated? Otherwise, any PHP developer can go in there, change the code and by pass it. Even if your customers don't know PHP, its just a matter of time a PHP guy gets his hands on it.


Cheers,



Dan

[scriptx]

Thanks for the great input. Well, the actual code in C but I was wondering if PHP could be of any help. Now, security is not super important. The software sales for less than $10 a piece. I can't care much if someone goes to the extend to find out how the mechanism of serial number works. I was wondering if PHP is the language to go with if I want to harness the CPU ID and/or HDD serial number and post it to some web page for retrieval later on. I can simply setup a googlepages page with all the serial numbers in it and have PHP check for the desired serial number and give the go ahead. Is that possible? Sorry, I am new to PHP and really can help a hand. I would appreciate snippets of the code for posting and retrieving data if you can.

Good day,