First of all you should ask yourself why you want do this. And obviously answer that too ...

Too often people feel like protecting their work using serials and stuff like that just to realize they provide little or no protection at all. Consider what happens when someone manages to replicate you serial generation process (which will eventually happen as your application is more and more used by people), or more simply one of your clients puts his/her serial on the Net. ;-)

On the other hand you could issue PGP certificates signed with your secret key, and have your application check the certificate fingerprint for authenticity. Of course that doesn't stop anyone from distributing one of your certs ... but if you really want to do this there's nothing to stop you.

Keep in mind that your app is in the user's hands, so anyone with some time and knowledge can trick it into "thinking" any other certificate is the "right" one.

You might find The Case of Quake Cheats illuminating about what that means.

Dodge This!

In reply to Re: Serial Generation and Validation by Ultra
in thread Serial Generation and Validation by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.