PORTLOCK

PORTLOCK   hardware lock for software is a dongle  that  connects on to the printer port of PC . It is used to protect the software  from piracy. It remains transparent to the printer operation. The printer port should be set in Standard parallel port mode for printer communication.

The  PORTLOCK  system consists of a DONGLE hardware  which  is  a  fully encapsulated  encrypter, which is  exercised  through  the   parallel port of the PC and software module that allows the  user  program  to check for the presence of PORTLOCK  on  the  parallel port.  Based  on  the  result from this check, user  program  can   take  appropriate  decision regarding further  execution  of  the  program.  This software module works on DOS/WINDOWS 9X/XP/NT platforms.

Each PORTLOCK is uniquely encrypted and assigned a serial  number  at the manufacturing stage. The software modules are specifically generated for each lock at the time of despatch.

At the Software vendor's end, the lock has to be integrated  with  the application software that is to be protected, at the time  of  despatch.  In case of mass produced software, the integration  of  software  with  hardware  lock can be done at  one  instance  and  multiple locks with same code number can be used with these  mass  produced copies of software.

The portlock software consists of two components:

1. A  device  driver that is to be booted  along  with  Operating  system
2. A  VC++  OBJ module that is  specifically  compiled  for  the particular lock module. This module provides functions to check presence of PORTLOCK. The application software can make calls to these functions and decide if further execution should be continued if the lock is present/not present.