USB software protection dongle for Java with an SDK which is cross-platform "for real". Does it exist?

Question

What I'd like to ask is if anybody knows about an hardware USB-dongle for software protection which offers a very complete out-of-the-box API support for cross-platform Java deployments.

Its SDK should provide a jar (only one, not one different library per OS & bitness) ready to be added to one's project as a library.

• The jar should contain all the native stuff for the various OSes and bitnesses
• From the application's point of view, one should continue to write (api calls) once and run everywhere, without having to care where the end-user will run the software
• The provided jar should itself deal with loading the appropriate native library

Does such a thing exist?

With what I've tried so far, you have different APIs and compiled libraries for win32, linux32, win64, linux64, etc (or you even have to compile stuff yourself on the target machine), but hey, we're doing Java here, we don't know (and don't care) where the program will run!

And we can't expect the end-user to be a software engineer, tweak (and break!) its linux server, link libraries, mess with gcc, litter the filesystem, etc...

In general, Java support (in a transparent cross-platform fashion) is quite bad with the dongle SDKs I've evaluated so far (e.g. KeyLok and SecuTech's UniKey). I even purchased (no free evaluation kit available) SecureMetric SDKs&dongles (they should've been "soooo" straighforward to integrate -- according to marketing material :\ ) and they were the worst ever: SecureDongle X has no 64bit support and SecureDongle SD is not cross-platform at all.

So, has anyone out there been through this and found the ultimate Java security usb dongle for cross-platform deployments?

Note: software is low-volume, high-value; application is off-line (intranet with no internet access), so no online-activation alternatives and the like.

-- EDIT

Tried out HASP dongles (used to be called "Aladdin"), and added them to the no-no list: here, too, there is no out-of-the-box (out-of-the-jar) support: e.g. end-linux-user has to manually put the .so library (the specific file for the appropriate bitness) in the right place on his filesystem, and export an env. variable accordingly.

Answer 1

Full disclaimer: I work for a company that makes software-protection dongles (CodeMeter). But I believe we might have a solution that meets your requirement: we have a single API for all platforms (Win, Mac, Linux, etc both 32- and 64-bits). Each end-user machine merely requires a runtime (service on Windows; daemon on Linux). We use a native Java API which uses TCP/IP to call our runtime, so no special device drivers are required. You can do activations either before you ship the dongle (pre-programming), or via file exchange (NikeNet) on deployments with no Internet access, or you can remove the dongle, take it to a machine that DOES have Internet connectivity and update the license there.

At a higher level than the API we have AxProtector, which is an automated protection/encryption tool that you can use to test our protection system with no source code changes. This would let you test the implementation on all platforms you are interested in--you don't need to create multiple versions for different platforms.

We had a Fortune 100 company use this to protect a Java app that ran on non-Intel Solaris, so we know it's been stress-tested as a cross-platform solution.

We have a free fully-functional eval system which we can get you asap. If you email me at the email address in my profile we can ship you out an SDK and help you quickly determine if this will solve your problem.

Answer 2

You can use Dinkey Pro dongles to achieve exactly this. While they do use separate native libraries for each operating system and architecture you just need to call their Java API and it takes care of any platform specific bits. Wrap the libraries up in a JAR file with the .class (the API) and you've got a neat solution. The dongles themselves are driverless.

Answer 3

I can only recommend to avoid the SecuTech UniKey system. During evaluation the product met all requirements we needed. We started integrating this solution and discovered one issue after another. Here is a short list of the major issues that are part of the SDK 6.2.7:

1. Enveloper settings change randomly when saving and loading the same solution (Video).
2. DLL files that are wrapped with the enveloper do not load.
3. The console version of the enveloper for script based builds does not work. It is unable to wrap exe/dll's that can be wrapped with the GUI based version of the enveloper.

Support is reactive but does not really tackle the problems.

After all we wasted almost a month of work integrating this protection system, but now have to switch due to the massive quality issues.