Software protection dongle Wikipedia. A software protection dongle commonly known as a dongle or key is an electronic copy protection and content protection device which, when attached to a computer or other electronic appliance, unlocks software functionality or decodes content. Fast And Furious 8 Full Movie In Hindi Free Download Hd 1080P. The hardware key is programmed with a product key or other cryptographic protection mechanism it attaches via electrical connector to an external bus of the computer or appliance. When used as a software protection device, dongles mostly appear as two interface security tokens with transient data flow that does not interfere with other dongle functions and a pull communication that reads security data from the dongle. Without the dongle, the software may run only in a restricted mode, or not at all. When used as a device attached to a computer or TV or gaming console, dongles can enable functions that would not be present without it. For example, a dongle attached to a TV may receive an encoded video stream, decode it in the dongle, and then present this audio and video information to the TV. Historyedit. Early software protection dongles. Sinclair QL dongle needed to expand internal ROM capacity in early QLs. In late 1. 97. 0searly 1. Wordcraft became the earliest program to use a software protection dongle. The dongle was passive using a 7. LS1. 65 8 bit shift register connected to one of the two tape cassette ports on the Commodore PET microcomputer. The tape cassette port supplied both power and bi directional data IO. The requirements for security were identified by the author of the Wordcraft word processor, Pete Dowson, and his colleague Mike Lake. How To Crack A Dongle Software Free' title='How To Crack A Dongle Software Free' />Through the network of PET users in the UK they made contact with Graham Heggie in Coventry and Grahams knowledge of electronics meant that they quickly arrived at the idea of a 7. LS1. 65 shift register connected to the tape cassette port which provided 5. V power and lines to shift the bits into the software. The shift register contained only 8 bits but with lines tied to ground or 5. V at random it could provide a random number between 0 and 2. The prototype was on Veroboard which dangled from the tape port edge connector on wires so dangle became dongle. Pete Dowson wrote special self modifying 6. How To Crack A Dongle Software Free' title='How To Crack A Dongle Software Free' />Dongle emulator for Aladdin HASP4 and HASP HL Dongles. Emulation of any hardware key. At that event, Apple unveiled ARKit, a new, free set of software tools that anyone can use to build impressive new apps and experiences on the iPhone and iPad. IR-Key_400_10.jpg' alt='How To Crack A Dongle Software Free' title='How To Crack A Dongle Software Free' />The first device used a commercial potting box with black or blue epoxy resin. Wordcrafts distributor at the time, Dataview Ltd., then based in Colchester, UK, went on to produce dongles for other software developers. When Wordcraft International was formed in Derby, UK, responsibility for manufacture was transferred to Brian Edmundson who also produced the plastic moulding for the enclosure. One of the greatest regrets of Graham, Pete and Mike was that they did not patent the idea when they came up with it. Versions of the Wordcraft dongle were later produced for Centronics parallel ports, 2. Among the computers supported, before the arrival of the IBM PC, were Chuck Peddles Sirius Systems Technology Victor 9. ACT Apricot Computers and the DEC Rainbow 1. An early example of the term was in 1. Sinclair QLs were shipped with part of the QL firmware held on an external 1. KB ROM cartridge infamously known as the kludge or dongle, until the QL was redesigned to increase the internal ROM capacity from 3. KB. 34Dongles rapidly evolved into active devices that contained a serial transceiver UART and even a microprocessor to handle transactions with the host. Later versions adopted the USB interface in preference to the serial or parallel interface. The USB interface is gradually becoming dominant. A 1. 99. 2 advertisement for Rainbow Technologies claimed the word dongle was derived from the name Don Gall. Though untrue, this has given rise to an urban myth. Efforts to introduce dongle copy protection in the mainstream software market have met stiff resistance from users. Such copy protection is more typically used with very expensive packages and vertical market software, such as CADCAM software, MICROS Systems hospitality and special retail software, Digital Audio Workstation applications, and some translation memory packages. In cases such as prepress and printing software, the dongle is encoded with a specific, per user license key, which enables particular features in the target application. This is a form of tightly controlled licensing, which allows the vendor to engage in vendor lock in and charge more than it would otherwise for the product. An example is the way Kodak licenses Prinergy to customers When a computer to plate output device is sold to a customer, Prinergys own license cost is provided separately to the customer, and the base price contains little more than the required licenses to output work to the device. USB dongles are also a big part of Steinbergs audio production and editing systems, such as Cubase, Wave. Lab, Hypersonic, HALion, and others. The dongle used by Steinbergs products is also known as a Steinberg Key. The Steinberg Key can be purchased separately from its counterpart applications and generally comes bundled with the Syncrosoft License Control Center application, which is cross platform compatible with both Mac OS X and Windows. Some software developers use traditional USB flash drives as software license dongles that contain hardware serial numbers in conjunction with the stored device ID strings, which are generally not easily changed by an end user. A developer can also use the dongle to store user settings or even a complete portable version of the application. Not all flash drives are suitable for this use, as not all manufacturers install unique serial numbers into their devices. Although such medium security may deter a casual hacker, the lack of a processor core in the dongle to authenticate data, perform encryptiondecryption, and execute inaccessible binary code makes such a passive dongle inappropriate for all but the lowest priced software. A simpler and even less secure option is to use unpartitioned or unallocated storage in the dongle to store license data. Common USB flash drives are relatively inexpensive compared to dedicated security dongle devices, but reading and storing data in a flash drive are easy to intercept, alter, and bypass. There are potential weaknesses in the implementation of the protocol between the dongle and the copy controlled software. It requires considerable cunning to make this hard to crack. For example, a simple implementation might define a function to check for the dongles presence, returning true or false accordingly, but the dongle requirement can be easily circumvented by modifying the software to always answer true. Modern dongles include built in strong encryption and use fabrication techniques designed to thwart reverse engineering. Typical dongles also now contain non volatile memory essential parts of the software may actually be stored and executed on the dongle. Thus dongles have become secure cryptoprocessors that execute program instructions that may be input to the cryptoprocessor only in encrypted form. The original secure cryptoprocessor was designed for copy protection of personal computer software see US Patent 4,1. Sept 1. 8, 1. 97. See also bus encryption. In cracked versions of a program, the code to check for a dongle is often deleted or circumvented. As a result, the cracked version may be easier to use and thus may be preferable to the original.