Question

i am making a business application and i cant afford other activation software to protect my software from being pirated. I am looking for some place to save my activation, trial and licence data in user’s computer.
I think that if i use compact editions of sql server and give password to it, it will be impossible for any other hacker or cracker to modify activation data and pirate my software? Is this safe or i shoul go for anyother option?

Answer 1

First, you must realize that making it ‘impossible’ to crack has been tried and tried again by the largest corporations and most sophisticated products- and it has always failed.

Having said that, you can make progress towards encouraging your customers to purchase a license by using a password protected encrypted database, password alone is not enough.

Also, what do you plan on using for your password? Is it going to be hardcoded? Will you salt a hardcoded pwd with something unique to the system its running on? Will that be good enough, I’m assuming if thats all you do breaking it would be fairly trivial- disassemble your code and find the hardcoded password, and figure out how you compute the system unique value.

Please take a look at this other similar SO Question and its answers- some are quite good.