Software Protection by Combining Hash Function with Hardware Identifications

Abstract

This paper presents a hybrid software copy protection scheme, the scheme is applied to prevent illegal copying of software by produce a license key which is unique and easy to generate. This work employs the uniqueness of identification of hard disk in personal computer which can get by software to create a license key after treated with SHA-1 one way hash function. Two mean measures are used to evaluate the proposed method, complexity and processing time, SHA-1 can insure the high complexity to deny the hackers for produce unauthorized copies, many experiments have been executed using different sizes of software to calculate the consuming time. The measures show high complexity and short execution time for proposed combining method.