A Distributed Architecture for Remote Validation of Software Licenses Using USB/IP Protocol

USB dongles have been used by a wide range of software manufacturers to store a copy-protected of their application’s license. The licenses validation procedure through USB dongles faces several concerns, as the risks of theft or losing dongle. Also, in scenarios where the number of dongles is reduced, users may have to wait for dongle access, which may lead to loss of productivity. In this paper we propose a client/server distributed architecture for remote software licenses validation, through USB/IP protocol. The proposed approach aims to take advantage of USB/IP for distributed access to a set of USB dongles physically connected to a remote USB server, over a TCP/IP network. We describe the deployment and enhancements made to an existing open source USB/IP implementation and also present the results obtained with this architecture in a real world scenario, for validation of computer forensics applications licenses that uses USB dongles.