Sentinel Hardware Keys for secure software copy protection, license control and trusted software distribution

 A software license is a formal contract between a software publisher and an end user of software. The contract regulates the terms on which the end user is granted a license to use one or more copies of the software. The ownership of these copies remains with the software publisher under the copyright laws. 

However, because many contracts are not respected, a need to protect the software against unauthorized use, also called software piracy has developed. The Sentinel hardware key solves this problem for more than 30000 software publishers around the world protecting huge intellectual property rights, IPR’s.

As an insurance to prevent unauthorized use of the copyrighted software it is easy, and very affordable,  to implement the Sentinel hardware key both for single or network users. This also enables the software publisher to easily update the end users with new releases and promote additional sale for new modules.  By using a Sentinel hardware key a software publisher can enforce his copyright, and secure his revenues.

From the early days of software protection solutions, in the beginning of the 1980`s, Sentinel hardware keys or dongles, have been technically perfected . The keys  are easy to implement for the developer, the distributor and for the end user. The Sentinel keys are reliable, compatible, and affordable. They come both in parallel and usb port versions, and offer a complete range of licensing models on all kind of platforms and software development tools.

The concept of having an external key, like a car key, to be able to execute the software application was developed by Rainbow Technology Inc in 1984 in California. In 1988 Perico A/S became the Nordic distributor.

The latest models of the Sentinel hardware keys are named Sentinel MegaPro, Sentinel UltraPro and Sentinel SuperPro. More than 30,000 developers around the world use the Sentinel hardware keys today protecting physically the software developers copyrights and license revenues 24/7 year after year.

Since 1995, we also offer software only license management systems for customers with strong focus on administration of licenses, and less on software security, like the solutions Sentinel LM and Sentinel RMS.