Sentinel Hardware Keys Developer's Guide - Customer Connection ...

Chapter 1 – Introduction
Contents Glossary Index Troubleshooting
Sentinel Keys Protect Against Software Piracy
4 Sentinel Hardware Keys Developer’s Guide
Sentinel Keys provide hardware token-based licensing to your software
application(s). These also provide better market penetration through easyto-implement
licensing models, such as demos, lease, and network licenses.
This section briefly explains the process of protecting your application and
describes how the protected application will behave when your customers
run it.
In order to protect your application, you first need to design the protection
strategy in the Sentinel Keys Toolkit 1 (referred as Toolkit hereafter). The
Toolkit is the main application using which you will do everything from preparing
a protection strategy to programming hardware keys.
Note: You may also program your Sentinel Keys using the Key Programming APIs.
Please refer to the section “Programming Sentinel Keys using the Key Programming
APIs”.
The Toolkit provides two basic methods to protect your applications:
CodeCover Protection 2 : The method in which protective wrappers
are put around the application quickly and easily. For more details,
see Chapter 4, “Protecting Applications Using CodeCover,” on page
75.
API Protection: The method in which you insert the Business Layer
API functions into your application's source code. For more details,
see Chapter 5, “Protecting Applications Using API,” on page 109.
Whatever method you choose, the outcome will be a protected application,
different from the original application. The protected application is dependent
on the Sentinel Key for execution. It will check for the presence of the
Sentinel Key in order to run successfully. If the operation is successful, the
application is allowed to run. If it fails, such as when the correct Sentinel
1.Available only on Windows.
2. Available only on Windows and can be used for protecting Windows 32-bit and 64-bit executables,
DLLs, and BPLs.