Security Protocol for Preventing Software Piracy: A Hybrid Approach

Abstract

In this Information era, almost everything is information. Nowadays even time and money are also described in a form of informational dimension. So to process those various kinds of data, the society needs various kinds of software solutions which are intellectual properties of their respective owners. But without proper approvals of the actual owners, the software products get copied, distributed, modified and used beyond the limits permitted by the license. This is called software piracy. The software piracy has major impact on software marketing and sales, quality of the software products and the healthy growth of the software development industry. There are some solutions have been developed to address these issues. But against piracy, most of them are failing. Serial number protection, online activation, hardware based solutions are among the widely used, yet mostly defeated anti-piracy methodologies. The identified facts on failure and vulnerability of the existing methodologies are; Uses a single authentication approach; and the static behavior of the anti-piracy protocols. This research, proposes a hybrid, dynamic approach to stand against the piracy attempts. The protocol uses hardware and online based authentication mechanism. The protocol proposing to use of a hardware module with unique serial number, with a small storage capacity; and online web service which provides secure authentication methods as an authentication paradigm. The dynamic behavior of the protocol which inherited from the design integrating the hardware module and online authentication system to behave in dynamic manner will make the protocol indestructible. The protocol uses industry accepted; proven cryptographic algorithms to protect the stored data, and also the protocol will always use secure connections while communicating with the online web service. To ensure the integrity and consistency of the authentication process, the protocol will validate each module among themselves. The protocol provides special user privilege granting mechanism, which can be used in granting access to restricted system functionalities. The protocol uses scalable technologies; hence the future possible requirements also can be addressed. The success of this research is certain to improve the lives of software developers while making it worse for software pirates.