A Special Guide to DRM and Software Activation Tools: Protect Data, Enforce Licenses

Initially embodied in consumer-level digital file delivery of audio, e-book and video files, digital rights management (DRM) schemes are being fastidiously adopted throughout certain enterprises. Similarly, software activation (SA) is being extended to internally developed enterprise software applications to both ensure the legitimacy of new client-side deployments and prevent the unauthorized duplication of such works. Many commercial software applications rely on software activation to enforce license agreements and provide installation and usage statistics to the software publisher. With the ubiquity of always-on Internet connectivity, Internet-based DRM and SA are rapidly becoming the norm for everything from commercial operating systems such as Microsoft's Windows XP and its upcoming Vista release to third-party software tools and design applications.

While SA focuses on license management and the enforcement of End User License Agreement (EULA) terms and conditions, DRM is used to enforce and protect the owner's intellectual property rights. In the United States, both DRM and SA rely on the combination of law and technology to ensure that the end user adheres to license terms. Strong cryptography, often in the form of a Public Key Infrastructure, is at the center of competent DRM and SA solutions. Reverse-engineering such cryptography can be deemed criminal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). These two barriers often provide enough deterrence to prevent casual breaches of a product's EULA.

DRM Solutions

While most people associate DRM with digital music and videos, the technology is increasingly used in the enterprise, especially in highly regulated industries such as defense and finance. In the corporate environment, DRM vendors enable their customers to digitally enforce corporate information distribution and confidentiality policies. Audit trails are captured and can be used to validate business practices and keep company secrets.

While some vendors, such as Adobe Systems, offer a targeted solution for a single document type rendered on multiple operating systems, others, such as SealedMedia, supply broader file-type protection on a single platform (Microsoft Windows). The DRM solutions featured in this guide are chiefly document-centric protection mechanisms with a monitoring server component that authorizes and controls access. For example, SealedMedia's document protection technology can be used to enforce the ISO17799 security classification, ranging from level 1 (top secret) to level 5 (public domain) clearance. It also monitors authorized individuals when accessing a document, tracking what they can or can't do with that document (print, cut and paste, forward and so on).

SA Tools

Although some DRM products offer extensible APIs for workflow and custom solutions, software activation interests both large corporations and independent developers for a variety of reasons. Although generating and protecting revenue streams for commercial software publishers is the most obvious rationale, license compliance—especially in publicly traded companies—is becoming even more important. With the heightened liability of business leaders due to Sarbanes-Oxley, surprise Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) audits and other concerns, CIOs are more focused than ever before on compliance. SA is one means of license management that can protect and inform both intellectual property owner and customer of their adherence to an agreed-upon EULA. Although most of the SA products featured here are optimized for software publishers, there's a growing recognition that corporations need more integrated tools to monitor their software license compliance.

Macrovision, in particular, is working with major software publishers such as Adobe to embed its FLEXnet software into its installations, letting customers centralize this activity for more flexible software license management. "Until the release of FLEXnet II, the control was much more in the hands of software publishers," says Macrovision's Director of ProjectManagement Suresh Balasubramanian. "With this release, the enterprises have a significantly increased amount of control in terms of how they deploy the licensed application." As for the technology itself, many SA vendors allow for granular identification and locking-down of software licenses to various hardware keys (hard drive serial numbers, BIOS signature, OS product identifier, MAC address) in addition to the vendor's own hidden cryptographic hashes. They also offer flexible operation models such as fixed expiration dates or a set number of program executions before the software has to be reactivated or permanently disabled. Others combine their software libraries with hosted application services to allow the customer's customers to call or e-mail their product activation hashes to the service. This is especially nice for companies seeking a one-stop solution.

The Future of DRM and SA

The debates rage on, but copyright and license enforcement technologies are here to stay. The question remains: How pervasive will they be in the future, and how rigid will the boundary be between open and closed access? The battle lines are already being drawn between free and open on the Linux platform and proprietary and closed on the Windows platform, with Unix OS vendors such as Apple and Sun taking the diplomatic midpoint by mixing free open source tools with proprietary protection measures. (Apple's Fairplay DRM in its iTunes product and the upcoming lockdown of its OS on authorized Intel-based chipsets are two examples.)

Another key question arises: When will these technologies be embedded at the operating system level—if at all? With the Trusted Computing Initiative already underway and the past instances of Apple and Microsoft embedding popular digital routines into their standard APIs, it's logical to assume that future operating systems will boast these technologies baked-in.

Ultimately, as it is today, the employment of DRM and SA will be based on commercial intent. Those seeking to commercialize their code and content will require SA and DRM; those who give away their binary assets in order to sell value-added services will not. Both of these strategies will coexist and evolve over time.

Evaluation Criteria

Note that many of the vendors I polled refused to disclose intimate details about how their products work, adhering to the questionable—but widely practiced—"security through obscurity" policy. While this approach is frowned upon by security experts and perpetuates distrust in DRM and SA products in general, these vendors follow it to protect their own intellectual property as well as that of their customers.

A significant factor to consider with any DRM or SA product is ease of use. "The universal rule is to make it secure and user friendly," says Jon Gillespie-Brown, CEO of security software company Nalpeiron. "Without the balance between the two, uptake will be resisted and the savings on piracy will be radically eroded by lost sales, increased operational costs and bad PR."

Features and Claims. I've included the marketed capabilities the products provide, as well as the functionality that sets each solution apart from its competitors. As with previous special guides, a selection of podcasts with some of these vendors is available at www.sdmagazine.com/podcasts/.

Market Buzz. This somewhat subjective category highlights what makes the product so attractive to prospective customers, as well as the interest and enthusiasm generated by reviewers, software advocates and actual customers. Deficiencies are sometimes mentioned, as well.

Cost. Pricing continues to remain an elusive measurement due to the context in which it is applied. For example, some vendors charge for software activations based on a per-click fee, while others offer a fixed cost regardless of usage, and still others combine activation and rights management with a hybrid application solution provider approach.

Mike Riley is a Naperville, Illinois-based advanced computing professional specializing in emerging technologies and new development trends. Contact him at [email protected].