Is the BIOS Serial Number Always Set, Constant & Reliable

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11 comments, last by aregee 9 years, 8 months ago

This kind of scheme is also going to fail if your user gets a new PC.

Why not use a third-party authentication provider instead of trying to roll your own?

Direct3D has need of instancing, but we do not. We have plenty of glVertexAttrib calls.

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- Motherboard BIOS (even UEFI) modding is not uncommon.

- Especially on desktop PCs the final user could change it's motherboard, so the UUID could change (mostly be empty or invalid od desktop PCs)

- On virtual machine the UUID is "fake" and easily editable by the final users.

- a motherboard UUID system protection will add only headache to the developers (they should need to add some sort of "re-validate" license system), will make final user angry (it's not nice see your software being blocked just for an hardware change) and you are also preventing users to install on multiple PCs the same software.

- Disassembly and searching for a certain and fixed winapi call is easy.

- It's just a waste of time, money and resources.

"Recursion is the first step towards madness." - "Skegg?ld, Skálm?ld, Skildir ro Klofnir!"
Direct3D 12 quick reference: https://github.com/alessiot89/D3D12QuickRef/

I was immediately thinking that your Media Access Control address could be used. Everything that is connected to the Internet has one, most have more, as anything that is part of the Ethernet protocol has one, and they are supposed to be unique. It is not (usually) very hard to change, though.

I was also thinking about CPUID: Processor Serial Number, but that does not seem to have been implemented for quite a few years, and AMD never implemented this. If I remember correctly, I used to turn this feature off in the BIOS anyway.

This discussion reminded me of how the Windows activation process works. Here is a discussion how it works, it might give you some ideas:

http://www.technibble.com/windows-xp-activation-explained/

A question to ask, is wether this is so important that you are willing to waste your time doing this? It is cracked faster than you can say 'cake' anyway, if the right person gets interest in your product.

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