Activation codes are used as an added measure of security for protecting your passwords and personal information online. They are also used to divert spammers and to ensure that the accounts are not created with bogus email addresses.
Activation codes are also used as protection against someone signing you up for a product or account that you did not request and they help to cut back on identity theft and provide added password protection. Although activation codes are designed to add security for password protection and other information, there are many ways that spammers and hackers still get around activation codes to commit criminal activity.
There are ways to avoid using activation codes especially when you download software. If you do not enter the activation code into the software it will still work without authenticating it. This stops basic key sharing, because the company knows if too many people from all over the world are all using the same key. Perhaps there is some kind of indentification involved using MAC address, too, with infinte registrations allowed on the same hardware but maybe a limited number on what appears to be a different computer.
This is still pretty easy and stops simple key sharing. People will actually have to get into cracking the software or faking the server response to get past it. Depending on how well this is obfuscated then it can be pretty difficult and time consuming to crack. Finally, a particularly guarded applciation might stay in constant contact with the server, refusing to work at all if the connection is severed.
In this case to get arouind the activation you need to fake the server itself. Steam emulators and private WoW servers are an example of this. I suspect a lot of the implementers will not give this information out because it opens them to hacking. But if I were to do this, this is how I would go about it:. For example, lets say I have some shareware I want to protect and when someone gives me money, I send them a 4-byte registration code.
I could build the algorithm into my shareware such that it validates the code the users enters. My algorithm would be as follows:. When the user enters a valid code, the software unlocks its regular functionality by setting a flag somewhere. Obviously, this is an extremely simplistic example. Registration validation algorithms can be as complex as you want. You can also perform this registration over the internet to protect your validation algorithm from reverse engineering, and keep people from sharing keys.
No validation scheme is perfect though. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. How does software activation work? Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 11 months ago. Active 11 years, 11 months ago. Viewed 10k times. Improve this question. Alan Haggai Alavi Quisque sed tellus felis. Donec ipsum mauris, sagittis eu accumsan in, aliquam non ipsum.
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More info Accept all cookies Only the necessary ones. How does product registration and activation work? What is product activation? Why do I have to activate my product? How does product activation work? Install the software. After entering your license details, the software calculates a code based on your PC's hardware configuration see below. This code is then displayed on screen. You then have to transmit to us your license details and this hardware code by following the instructions in the activation dialogue.
You give us your hardware code and we give you your activation code.
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