Omnis Externals
Application Distribution Control System
Do you want to protect your Omnis application from being copied to multiple client machines without your agreement or without you getting paid for the seat license? For developers of high per-seat value applications, this is a concern and potential source of revenue loss.
Using the Artificia Distribution Control system, you can lock each copy of your Omnis application against the harddrive of the machine it is installed on.
The system comprises client side and discrtibutor side software. On the client, two of our externals must be added to the xcomp directory of the application installation. Sample Omnis code is provided which slots into your application and talks to both externals. On the distributor side, an encryption external and Omnis library is provided.
How does it work?
See the diagrams for illustration of data flow
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Initialisation Phase: The client app queries the Signature external which returns the unique identifier for the first permanent harddrive on the PC. We call this the StationId. The application provides this to the user and advises them to contact the software distributor and supply this StationId. The distributor runs the StationId through their Disctribution Control Omnis app which encrypts the StationId, using the Artificia Crypto TripleDES encryption external. The encryption key embedded in the Distribution Control App must match that embedded in the Client application (which will not be accessible by client if the application library is locked - as is normal practise).
The distributor sends the encrypted StationId back to the user who then enters that into the client application. The client application records the encrypted StationId to a stationid.txt text file for use in every subsequent Runtime phase.
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Runtime Phase: Every time the application starts, the application queries the harddrive via the Signature external to obtain a real time reading of the unique identifier of the harddrive (i.e. the StationId). The application then encrypts the StationId using their copy of the Crypto external and compares it with the contents of the stationid.txt text file. If they match, the full application is launched. If not, either the initialisation hasn't yet occured or a piracy attempt is in progress. In either case, the user is advised to contact the software distributor with their StationId in order to obtain a key to unlock the application for their particular PC.
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Use Signature to:
- Control distribution of an Omnis Studio application
by locking each installation (seat) against the harddrive of the
client machine.
- Obtain any of the following for a client running
an Omnis application
- a string to uniquely identify the Harddrive
- a string to uniquely identify the Hardware
configuration
- the Windows Computer Name
- the Windows User Name
Signature is only available for Windows.
Further Information
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