Abstract

Offer a dongling system for developers so they can sell dongles to their clients for running encrypted vvvv patches.

It is in vvvvs interest that people who want to employ such a system for their clients buy such a solution from vvvv. Like this vvvv can be certain that for every client running an encrypted patch the developer bought a license.

This means developers have to buy dongles from vvvv. This can be enforced since vvvv can have a contract with a dongle-vendor that is based on a specific SDK ID. This SDK ID is on the USB dongle when purchased and guarantees that only dongles registered to vvvv will work with vvvv, i.e. no other clients than the vvvv group can buy dongles from the same manufacturer and create their own dongles.

System

Dongles

Developers can pay a dongle-upgrade for every license they buy and get a USB dongle from vvvv.

Encryption Tool

There will be a tool that can be freely downloaded which allows a developer to encrypt patches with a dongle bought from vvvv.

• Start the tool
• Insert the dongle
• point to a directory of .v4p and .fx files
• specify an encryption key
• Encrypt
• all files encrypted to a new directory (.v4x, fxx)
• the encryption key is saved to the dongle
• writes a license.lic file to disk which has the encryption key

vvvv

If vvvv is started with
/r root.v4x
it will look for a dongle with the correct ID. If the dongle is detected it looks for
\license.lic
and ask the dongle to decode its content which will be the key to decrypt the actual .v4x files.

Actual decrypting is then handled by vvvv itself using this key.

Blackbox (VVVV)

• In: Check for Dongle
• Out: Is Blackbox Mode
• Out: Dongle Is Present
• Out: Custom License String

Workflow

Encryption

Connect the dongle to an USB port, open the Encrypter and perform the following steps:

• 1.) Select the root folder of your project. The Encrypter will scan the directory for files to encrypt (*.v4p; *.fx) and files to copy (all other files but not *~.xml).

• 2.) Select the output folder where the encrypted patches should be stored.

• 3.) Enter a 16 character encryption key or generate a random one with the 'Random' button.

• 4.) (Optional) Enter a custom text that you want to process in your patch. e.g. version info, license duration or such.

• 5.) If all steps are performed the 'Encryption' button will appear and you are ready to encrypt your project.

Decryption

Connect the dongle to an USB port and start vvvv with the following commandline parameters:

 /r C:\PathToYourEncryptedProject\_root_patch.v4x

Make shure that the license.lix file lies in the same folder as the encrypted root patch of your project.