A typical problem with storing sensitive data is facing the risk that someone could copy and spy on the information. This type of theft has been seen countless times for information stored on typical home PC's, such as home banking and credit card information.
Although the optimum answer to such problems would be hardware-based security devices capable of storing such information, this is a costly solution that does not necessarily satisfy the demand for a particular market. Assuming that users are not experts in hardware security and are unlikely to understand why it's useful, employing such methods could produce more support troubles for vendors than it solves.
For license management and copy protection, it is unlikely that hardware would be used as the solution to sensitive data security, if only for the simple reason that no one is interested in paying for such hardware.
To address such security issues, we've taken a different approach and have created a secure storage engine that is entirely software based. Although the solution cannot surpass the security of hardware devices, it certainly improves the security of fixed locations where information is stored. The idea behind this method of security is to scatter information and collect it when needed. This information can be scattered to as many as 500 different locations making it extremely difficult to globally reconstruct the information and all the redundancy information.
This functionality will be introduced in the next version of
LM-X License Manager to solve some particular customer requests.
If you'd like more details about our secure storage solution, feel free to contact me on the subject at hg@x-formation.com.
