Question

I am developing an activation application, which I need to collect the BIOS serial number to identify the PC,
the Application combine the BIOS serial Number to other data, which will be encrypted,
I need my data not to exceed the block size of the encryption to prevent building another block which means a longer activation string.
I need to make sure that the BIOS serial number’s length will not exceed a certain value, if it is less, I can add some data, but if it exceeds I cannot trim it since I need to make sure there is no activation key works for two PCs.

My question simply is: What is the maximum length of the BIOS Serial number ?
and how I can get these standards?

P.S. doing trim made us a great problem since there are some serials are too longer than the requested value, so there exists a key running more than one PC.

Regards,

Answer 1

All these standards are defined in the SMBIOS tables and AFAIK there is not a maximum or fixed length for the BIOS serial number, this is just a null terminated string.