Software Protection Services Ship

Commercial developers can now get Software Licensing and Protection (SLP) Services, a set of tools that help prevent unauthorized use of software through product activation and that protect intellectual property by making it harder to reverse-engineer .NET code. But pricing may put the product out of reach for small ISVs.

Three Editions

SLP helps developers prevent piracy by allowing them to implement an activation system similar to that used by Microsoft as part of its Windows Genuine Advantage program, although the two programs are independent and do not share any code.

Protected applications run under the control of a Secure Virtual Machine (SVM), a runtime that is linked in to the resulting application and that interprets and executes protected code. Developers use the SLP Code Protector SDK, an add-in to Visual Studio, to mark sections of their code as “licensable entities” that the SVM will allow to execute only if an appropriate digital license has been obtained. Protected code is also transformed in a way that makes it much harder to reverse-engineer the original source code. Digital licenses are obtained from an SLP server that can be run either as a Microsoft-hosted service or an on-premise server. Activations can be assigned to a specific machine (similar to what Microsoft uses for Office and Windows) and developers can control what features are enabled, whether the activation is perpetual or good for a limited time before it must be renewed, and how many times a license can be reactivated in the event the application needs to be reinstalled.