The Design And Implementation Of An Online Authorization And Certification Platform

As the increasing complexity of software systems'functionality, software publishers want to control not only whether the software itself was illegally copied, but also the way and parameters of using the software, and so forth. On the other hand, with the number of released software increasing rapidly, the management of software licensing becomes more and more complex.To solve the above problems, this article firstly analyzes the popular solutions of software protection and licensing comprehensively. And then we propose a new generation software protection solution base on the Internet: Online Authorization and Certification Platform. In this platform, we use Internet servers to replace the traditional solution of the hardware-based cryptographic or license file based certification. The platform provides the function of online authorization, the management of software products and users, the publication of software updates, etc. More importantly, the platform guarantees the legal usage of software products by carrying out a set of encryption based protection strategies.The article introduces the design and implementation of the online authorization and certification platform, which is based on B/S (browser/server), and C/S (client/server) architecture, and its development library of certification module. The software publisher can easily publish and manage software authorization, and then, the software will be protected by the online certification mechanism after software developers integrate the certification module to it.The online authorization and certification platform is composed of two parts: the platform management subsystem and the certification-update subsystem. The platform management subsystem is built by using Struts and iBatis framework. The system of certification, which is a part of the certification-update subsystem, is built by using JSSE (Java Secure Socket Extension) technology underlying the X.509 digital certificate authority and SSL-based encrypted transmission. The system of automatic update, another part of the certification-update subsystem, defines the update configuration and communication protocol, and realizes automatic update of the client software. To sum up, the online authorization and certification platform achieves comprehensive certification and encryption based protection not only on the network transmission, but also on the client software.