Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ukma!gatech!purdue!umd5!ames!amdahl!oliveb!sun!pepper!cmcmanis
From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: An Idea for Hardware Protection
Keywords: "personal" dongle
Message-ID: <38413@sun.uucp>
Date: 11 Jan 88 05:50:55 GMT
References: <8801090958.AA20842@ucscb.UCSC.EDU>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 25

Dongles fail for a lot of reasons, but lets look at this more as a key 
rather than as an interface ok? So you build a 'standard' keyhole in the
computer which is nothing more than an interface to read a key device.
On suggestion I heard once was a credit card with a magnetic stripe on 
the back that contains the serial number. Run the program, zip the credit
card through the slot on the front, and voila the program starts. A more
interesting 'key' was the one proposed by some users group that had an
EEPROM in it. Seems the software would read the key, and then change the 
eprom. (Recording the number of times it had been read or something) Then
the software could authenticate the keyvalue with it's internal value 
and if you duplicated the key physically, you couldn't run it more than
once with the bogus key. (Which would become the valid key because the 
original would now have an invalid number in it). This scheme eliminated
the 'dangling dongle' syndrome because you only had to put it in when the
program started. You could leave the key in if you only used that one program.
Anyway, it made a reasonably workable solution out of the existing 
unworkable one. The only problem was that a computer manufacturer had to
bite the bullet and put the 'keyhole' in to the machine as standard 
equipment. Well that raises prices, and that makes the box less competitive,
etc and basically no one was willing to gamble on the increased revenue
from all these grateful software vendors porting their software.

--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.