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I'm planning to buy CryptoLicensing but before buying it I'd like to get some feedbacks if anyone tried it before. Also it'd be interesting if anyone cracked it or spotted an easy hack against it.

I've seen some other SO questions regarding the choosing a .NET licensing component but if you currently happy with another component it'd be nice to hear your experience. It's just quite hard to nail this without going through a long trial.

hawbsl
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dr. evil
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    Their support is worst, they didn't bother to reply to their customers. Even if you purchase their priority support as I already did, they didn't provide any solutions. Several times I got stuck in bottleneck situations and on contacting support they just stop replying to your mails. Don't even think of buying this product. – prem Jul 01 '15 at 06:26

6 Answers6

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I bought the licensing and obfuscator products from LogicNP and I'm quite satisfied.

CryptoLicensing:

The good:

  • good value for your money. I didn't pay through the nose and the product accomplished what it needed to
  • good flexibility - I could generate licenses to reflect all sorts of settings and fairly easily too. Also seeing all the features in the license generator interface gave me a number of good ideas for different licensing schemes for my product
  • ease of use: setting this up wasn't too difficult. I was also surprised at how easy setting up an online license service was for someone like me who has little experience with ASP.Net (the license service is necessary for eCommerce sites and for activating licenses on a fixed number of computers per license)
  • good customer support - I tried to wait until I was absolutely stuck before bothering them but they get back to me fairly quickly

The Bad (or rather not quite as good as I'd like):

  • the documentation could be a little clearer at times. All major topics are covered and some of the trickier areas are covered somewhere (either in the help file or the online Knowledge Base) but I wish there was more depth in the documentation so I didn't have to hunt around. I did have to figure out a few things on my own which the documentation could have covered.
  • like the documentation, the license generator UI could stand to be tightened up a bit. But I suppose the company could triple the price to be in line with the industry and give me a product that was far sexier but I like what I got.

CryptoObfuscator

I don't have much experience with trying to reverse engineer .Net programs so I can't comment on how secure it made my product. Obfuscation will never be perfect but it at least hinders most hackers enough to get them to give up. Like CryptoLicensing, CryptoObfuscator's documentation and UI could be tightened up a bit but I got good value for my money. What I really like is that once I set up the obfuscator for .net solution , I never have to think about it again other than to enable or disable the obfuscator from within Visual Studio.

Chris
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  • Does it come with an online license service? How the online activation work with this product? – nam Oct 19 '14 at 15:45
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In general, there is no such thing as an uncrackable system, if anybody claims this, they are ignorant or lying. Your aim should not be to look for an uncrackable system becuase such a system does not exist.

Your aim should be to use a easy-to-use, affordable system which offers reasonably strong protection, so that you do not have to spend time on the licensing/obfuscation part of your software but instead can concentrate on the core functionality of your software.

logicnp
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    I just downvoted because dr. evil specifically asked everyone to share their experience with CryptoLicensing or other licensing software so unless the question originally included asking for opinions on software "crackability" the answer is completely off topic. Besides, we all know there was never any desirable software cracked versions of which were not released on the "scene" very quickly after the official release, so this answer is pretty much like stating "the sky is blue". So Chris, if there is anyone to ridicule that would be you... – Dean Kuga Sep 29 '12 at 05:22
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I was also looking at it, but it seems like it has been cracked, and easily too. The ease of the bypass makes me wonder if Crypto Licensing spends more attention on marketing than on the product.

The bypass also works on the Crypto Obfuscator security product.

The code is here: (http://board.b-at-s.info/index.php?showtopic=7451 or http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:x6Viykf521sJ:board.b-at-s.info/index.php%3Fshowtopic%3D7451+black+strom+cryptoobfuscator&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au)

RedCode
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  • Unless I'm mistaken you would have to globally configure your system to bypass strong name verification to get that to work? So to get the hack to work you have to compromise the security of your whole system re. .Net framework stuff. – Tim Lloyd Dec 28 '10 at 01:54
  • Although I guess you could disassemble your exe, fix up your references, and then reassemble. It starts getting non-trivial then although I guess you could write a tool to do it. – Tim Lloyd Dec 28 '10 at 02:06
  • Yes, it just bothers me that a company selling a licensing and security product has their own product broken so easily. – RedCode Jan 04 '11 at 05:07
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    See licensing tips and tricks at http://www.ssware.com/articles/writing-effective-license-checking-code-and-designing-effective-licenses-with-cryptolicensing.htm - we implement them for Crypto Obfuscator and CryptoLicensing too, so anybody using a cracked version are in for a surprise. – logicnp Jan 14 '11 at 06:03
  • @RedCode thank you for your answer. The links you posted do not seem to work. i want to pay for their product, but it's disconcerting to see that the product is hacked and i am curious to know more. – BenKoshy Mar 04 '16 at 06:27
  • **was** hacked, in 2010. Everything is hackable. If they really want it that bad, they will get it. Who cares, they were never going to pay anyway. %%%% them. – CAD bloke Apr 25 '17 at 05:41
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Support is slow. Documentation reads as it has been obfuscated as well. the UI is counterintuitive. The license service requires a lot of manual configuration + extra programming... E-commerce integration only works partially... No one notifies the user/buyer of generated license, you need to write code for this yourself.

I wouldn't believe the few negative pieces of feedback before buying it myself.. since there are a lot of big names marketed on the site + when you look at the features there are a ton of them...

I bought the Enterprise version and other tools from logincp together thinking I was buying a complete system. Unexpectedly, the Only thing I'm happy about is crypto-obfuscator.

All the rest requires a lot of work to set up. I've switched to a cheap php licensing system that I was able to code in just a few days while with cryptolicensing I was already a week further without having the system set up...

user1841243
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We are just starting out with CryptoLicensing so I can't give your question a direct answer.

But I think it's worth saying that we have found their customer service very responsive. We got good, timely replies to emails and they went the extra mile with one particular issue we had.

hawbsl
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I've been using CryptoLicensing for over a year now and have found it to be a very good product with a good price point. There is a bit of a learning curve, but their documentation is good so this should not be a problem. I also agree with @hawbsl above that the company provides good timely email support.

Sean Kearon
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