dongle

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2008)

This article contains weasel words, vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. Such statements should be clarified or removed. (May 2008)

Chained parallel port copy prevention dongles.

A dongle is a small piece of hardware that connects to a computer or laptop.^[1] It is a portable device and is often identical in appearance to a USB Pen. Although earlier use of dongles was to authenticate a piece of software, the word dongle is now widely used to refer to a broadband wireless adaptor.^[2][3]

Electrically, the authentication dongles mostly appear as two-interface security tokens with transient data flow that does not interfere with other dongle functions and a pull communication that reads security data from the dongle. Without the dongle, the software will run only in a restricted mode, or not at all. Dongles are used by some proprietary vendors as a form of copy protection or digital rights management, because it is much harder to replicate a dongle than to copy the software it authenticates. Despite being a hardware device, dongles are not a complete solution to the trusted client problem.

History

WORDCRAFT was the first program to use a software protection dongle, in 1980. Its dongle was a simple passive device that supplied data to the pins of a Commodore PET's external cassette port in a pre-determined manner. This was possible because the PET cassette port supplied both power and data connections through a proprietary edge connector. It did, however, make the cassette port unusable for its intended purpose.

The two-cubic-inch (32 cm³) resin-potted first generation device was called a "dongle" by the inventor, in the absence of a suitable term. The distributor, Dataview Ltd., then based in Colchester, UK, then went on to produce a derivative dongle, which became their core business.

Dongles rapidly evolved into active devices that contained a serial transceiver (UART) and even a microprocessor to handle transactions with the host. Later versions adopted the USB interface in preference to the serial or parallel interface. Currently, the USB interface is gradually becoming dominant.

Interestingly, modern smart cards present the same feature set as modern dongles. Given this, the dongle market may be overtaken by smart cards, as smart cards are more secure and powerful by design than traditional MCU based dongles. Some dongle vendors are producing one-chip dongles, which combine the smart card and the smart card reader in the same chip. This structure makes a smart card dongle easy and stable.

A 1992 advertisement for Rainbow Technologies (now SafeNet—a dongle vendor in the U.S) claimed the word was derived from the name "Don Gall". Though untrue, this has given rise to an urban myth.

During 2008 to 2009, due to the financial crisis, some big actions were taken in dongle area. Aladdin first bought Eutron, an european dongle vendor before 2008. Six months later, Aladdin was acquired by SafeNet. After this transation, Rainbow (SafeNet), Aladdin (HASP) and Eutron merged to a single entity.

Copy protection

USB dongles in two case sizes

Vendors of software-protection dongles (and dongle-controlled software) often use terms such as hardware key, hardware token, or security device instead of dongle, but the term "dongle" is much more common in day-to-day use. One vendor's term is HASP, standing for Hardware Against Software Piracy. Another vendor's term is Sentinel SuperPro. New force like UniKey and SecureMetric also joined this area.

Usage

Efforts to introduce dongle copy-prevention in the mainstream software market have met stiff resistance from users. Such copy-prevention is more typically used with very expensive packages and vertical market software, such as CAD/CAM software, MICROS Systems hospitality and special retail software, Digital Audio Workstation applications, and some translation memory packages. The vast majority of printing and prepress software, such as CtP workflows, requires dongles.

In cases such as prepress and printing software, the dongle is encoded with a specific, per-user license key, which enables particular features in the target application. This is a form of tightly controlled licensing, which allows the vendor to engage in vendor lock-in and charge more than it would otherwise for the product. An example is the way Creo licenses Prinergy to customers: When a computer-to-plate output device is sold to a customer, Prinergy's own license cost is provided separately to the customer, and the base price contains little more than the required licenses to output work to the device. Well-known software-protection dongle manufacturers include Matrix (Matrix Dongle), SafeNet (Rainbow before an acquisition), Feitian Technologies (former distributor of Aladdin), Aladdin (acquired by SafeNet), Microcosm Ltd (Dinkey Dongles), WIBU-SYSTEMS, SG-Lock, UniKey (or SecuTech), Jansh, Senselock (or Sense), SPYRUS, Inc. (Rosetta USB, Hydra PC), and MARX (CRYPTO-BOX). In the digital audio world, some versions of Pro Tools and many plugins use the Pace iLok Smart Key USB dongles.

USB dongles are also a big part of Steinberg's audio production and editing systems, such as Cubase, Wavelab, Hypersonic, HALion, and others. The dongle used by Steinberg's products is also known as a Steinberg Key. The Steinberg Key can be purchased separately from its counterpart applications and generally comes bundled with the "Syncrosoft License Control Center" application, which is cross-platform compatible with both Mac OS X and Windows.

Issues

USB port dongle

There are potential weaknesses in the implementation of the protocol between the dongle and the copy-controlled software. It requires considerable cunning to make this hard to crack. For example, a naïve implementation might simply define a function to check for the dongle, returning "true" or "false" accordingly, but the dongle requirement can be easily circumvented by modifying the software to always answer "true".

Modern dongles include built-in strong encryption and use fabrication techniques designed to thwart reverse engineering. Typical dongles also now contain non-volatile memory — key parts of the software may actually be stored and executed on the dongle. Thus dongles have become secure cryptoprocessors that execute inaccessible program instructions that may be input to the cryptoprocessor only in encrypted form. The original secure cryptoprocessor was designed for copy protection of personal computer software (see US Patent 4,168,396, Sept 18, 1979)^[4] to provide more security than dongles could then provide. See also bus encryption.

However, security researchers warn that dongles still do not solve the trusted client problem: if you give a user the cryptographic ciphertext, the algorithm and the key, your cipher is likely to be breakable, even with the algorithm and key encoded in hardware.^[5]

In counterfeit versions of a program, the code to check for a dongle is often deleted or circumvented. As a result, the counterfeit version may be easier to use and thus may seem preferable to the original.

Hardware cloning, where the dongle is emulated by a device driver, is also a lethal threat to traditional dongles. To thwart this, some dongle vendors adopted smart card product, which is widely used in extremely rigid security requirement environments such as military and banking, in their dongle products.

Dongle drivers bring problems for end-users. Most developers and software vendors want to get rid of the dongle driver headache. There are some driverless dongles on the market, which make the protection easy for both software vendors and end-users.

A more innovative modern dongle is designed with a code porting mechanism, meaning you can transfer part of your important program code or license enforcement into a secure hardware environment (such as in a smart card OS, mentioned above). An ISV can port thousands of lines of important computer program code into the dongle.

Real Time Dongle

The Real time dongle contains an internal real time clock, independent from the Operating system clock, and designed for software vendors who need to control and manage rental and sale usage and/or maintenance. This allows pay per use by charging the end users timely and periodically for actual periods of use. This function is based on a real time clock in the dongle which records the specific time (hour, minute, second) and date (day, month, year). If there isn't battery inside dongle, the dongle is not real time dongle. There are only 2 real time dongles, the one is HASP Time, and the other is UniKey Time.

Game consoles

Some unlicensed titles for game consoles used dongles to connect to officially licensed cartridges, in order to circumvent the authentication chip embedded in the console.

Other hardware

A typical PCMCIA card dongle

The term "dongle" has been generalized to refer to things that are structurally different than connectors that translate one type of port to another — for example, an 8P8C modular jack that plugs into the edge connector on a PC Card or ExpressCard Ethernet adapter (shown at right). These are sometimes called "pigtails" — a term that traditionally refers to a short cable with a connector at one end and bare leads at the other, but has also been generalized to refer to a very short patch cable. Similarly, a dongle with one connector on one end and multiple connections on the other is also called a breakout cable.

Dongle may also mean a small active device such as a USB flash drive or a wireless networking adapter. Douglas Adams, in a 1990s column for the US edition of MacWorld magazine, used the term "little dongly things" to describe converters for adapting US power cables to international plugs.^[6] However, these broader usages are not universally accepted.

Manufacturers

• Aladdin -- Hardlock, HASP
• Data Encryption Systems Ltd DESkey
• Eutron Electronic Technologies (acquired by Aladdin)
• Feitian Technologies Co., Ltd.
• Jansh
• Matrix Software License Protection System
• Microcomputer Applications, Inc. (MAI) -- KEYLOK
• MicroWorks, Inc. SmartDongle (TM)
• Pace -- iLok
• SafeNet
• RigiSystems AG — ubKey
• SecuTech Solution Inc. -- UniKey
• Senselock Data Security Center
• SG-Lock
• SPYRUS, Inc.
• Syncrosoft/Steinberg
• WIBU-SYSTEMS AG
• MARX Software Security GmbH
• Okyanus Bilisim Teknolojileri - O-Key Dongle

Popular culture

• The term dongle is used in the first season of the popular web series "Red vs. Blue" produced by Roosterteeth, although in their reference, they are referring more specifically to a switch, and not the exact definition
• A "dongle bomb" was a recurring device in the Adventures of Jetman, a cartoon strip in the 1980s computer magazine, Crash. ^[7]

References

See also

• The trusted client model
• Security token
• Lock-out chip

External links

• Jargon File: dongle
• A history of dongles and software licensing
• The problem with dongles
• 7 things to consider when sourcing dongles