|
|
|
Underlying technology
Guiding principles
Hydra's architecture was designed with the following goals in mind:
Minimal user intervention at all stages
(trial, payment, activation, usage, reinstallation),
Impossibility for users or system administrators to bypass the protection,
Flexibility when upgrading user's computers,
Use of bullet-proof cryptography techniques,
Service-oriented API for no-brainer integration.
A sound architecture as the first means of security
Hydra is based on a client-server architecture with both client and server
communicating using a highly secure channel over the Internet.
The Hydra server has several functions:
|
|
Handles requests over the Internet,
|
|
|
Controls, allocates and distributes activation codes and licence keys,
|
|
|
Manages a central database of hardware fingerprints, activation codes, licence
keys and other purchase information,
|
|
|
Works with web stores/e-commerce providers (via activation codes) or interfaces
directly with banks.
|
The Hydra library offers a high-level service-oriented API which transparently:
|
|
Controls the right to execute of an application, both during the trial period
and after purchase,
|
|
|
Interfaces with the computer hardware and operating system to extract fingerprints,
|
|
|
Stores and manages licence keys and reinstalls them automatically when needed.
|
Bullet-proof cryptography
In order to encrypt both the secure communication channel and licence keys,
Hydra makes use of the following combination of cryptography technologies:
RSA with 2048-bit keys for asymmetric public encryption,
AES with 256-bit keys as symmetric cipher,
RIPEMD with 160-bit keys for cryptographic authentication.
To put this into perspective, this ensures a level of protection billions of
times higher than that used by electronic commerce on the web.
These technologies and the key sizes we use make it mathematically impossible to
decrypt or tamper with Hydra's licence keys and client-server communication.
Portability, Scalability and Reliability
Hydra is highly portable and both the client and server are currently available
on Windows (from 95 SE to XP Pro SP1) and on Linux (from kernel 2.4 on x86).
On Windows and Linux, the library itself is provided as a C library which can be
linked and used from any programming language.
On the Microsoft .NET framework, the library is provided as a strong-named assembly.
Hydra's server component is also designed to be highly scalable to be able to
support the highests numbers of simultaneous trials and activations.
At the lower end of the spectrum, one small physical server can be configured
to protect several applications. At the higher end, it is possible to protect a
single application using a pool of several physical servers distributed over a network.
Byssus offers Hydra both as a product and as a managed service. The latter is
hosted in a secure data center on a redundant platform providing 99.9% uptime.
Further details on Hydra internals are provided in our White Paper available in
our Downloads page.
|
|
