How to bind software to mac address?

Question

I have written a software which I would like to bind to mac. Is there any specific algorithm to bind mac address with my software? Thank you for help ! Edit: I want to provide serial number according to user's mac address.

Answer 1

The comment above is right - the MAC address is widely used for node-locking, but it is a poor choice as it is easily changed in OS.

A more secure approach is to use a combination of hardware and software system parameters, such as hard disk ID, system name, user OS login name, CPU ID etc.. The selection available will depend on the specific OS and programming language you use.

However, to avoid problems down the road, I'd suggest you think about the following:

• How do you obtain the system parameters? If you ask the user to provide them there is opportunity for human error, such as entering a '1' for an 'l' or a '0' for an 'O'. Then the license won't work and the user will be inconvenienced.
• What if the parameter you lock to changes, say if the user upgrades their system by changing a piece of hardware? Will it break your system and need the user to request a new license from you?
• What if the user wants to move their license to another system, or to a new machine? Can your licensing system allow this without making it easy for the user to run one license on both the old and new systems?

These are the kinds of issues that cause home-built licensing systems to annoy legitimate users, and not be very secure against would-be hackers.

Commercial licensing systems should of course have dealt with these and other issues already.

Answer 2

Write MAC Adress into a kind of license file. On startup read the MAC-Adress and compare it with configured. If not equal --> stop with error.

To create a unique serial number out of a mac address you have to apply an algorithm to macaddress. There are some comercial tools for that for you professionally. Some thoughts to licensing can be found here and here

Answer 3

I take it you're looking to achieve some sort of node-locking of your app to a specific device. If so, you might be disappointed to learn that the MAC address is not always a persistent value on a device. In fact, some devices have multiple MAC addresses, so it's not a particularly reliable value to use when looking to find a persistent hardware ID to bind to.

Our solution for Node-Locking Licenses to a device at LicenseSpring (we specialize in this sort of stuff) is that we generate a device fingerprint by hashing the serial numbers of some of the hardware we read on the device (such as the CPUID + BaseboardID + SystemDiskID). When the end user retrieves the license key, they use that hash along with the license key to perform a license check, which is computed on the fly. The license key is set to only be usable on a finite number of devices, so if another device tries to use the license key, they will compute a different hardwareID and be blocked.

So long as you're hashing those serial numbers in the same way, you won't run into any trouble...

You CAN store information in the key itself, such as product info / device info etc. but I would also advise against that. Mainly because there's only so much info that can fit into a key, and then it makes it quite easy to reverse engineer.

Instead, I'd suggest you use the server response from the online license check to send back license entitlements as well as signing the server response, and use that to control the state of your application.