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.