Product Overview

Sentinel LDK is Thales' industry-leading software protection and licensing solution. It provides cutting edge security technologies for the utmost in copy protection, a range of license models and entitlement fulfillment options, and out-of-the-box tools which facilitate quick integration and deployment. Sentinel LDK supports hardware-based, software-based and cloud-based licensing and includes a range of APIs to allow software vendors to automate and tailor the implementation to their unique business requirements.

The strength, uniqueness, and flexibility of Sentinel LDK are based on two primary principles:

>Protect Once—Deliver Many—Evolve Often™ — this unique design philosophy enables you to fully separate your business and protection (engineering) processes in order to maximize business agility while ensuring optimum use of your employee time and core competencies, resulting in faster time to market.

>Cross-Locking™ — the technology that supports the Protect Once—Deliver Many—Evolve Often concept, enabling a protected application to work with a Sentinel hardware key or a Sentinel License Certificate (software key).

All commercial decisions, package creation and license definitions are executed by product or marketing managers after the protection has been implemented.

This workflow model provides you with greater flexibility and freedom when defining new sales and licensing models, including feature-based and component licensing, evaluation, rental, floating, subscription, trialware, pay-per-use, and more, enabling you to focus on revenue growth.

Sentinel Vendor Keys

When you purchase Sentinel LDK, you are provided with two Sentinel Vendor keys—the Sentinel Developer key and the Sentinel Master key.

The Sentinel Developer key is used by your software engineers in conjunction with the Sentinel LDK protection tools to protect your software and data files.

The Sentinel Master key is only required if you install Sentinel LDK-EMS on premises. It is used in conjunction with Sentinel LDK and is attached to the Sentinel LDK-EMS Server. This key is used by your production staff to create licenses and lock them to Sentinel protection keys, to write specific data to the memory of a Sentinel protection key, and to update licenses already deployed in the field.

Important: The Master key is especially valuable because it is used to generate licenses. Both Vendor keys contain secrets and enable the use of tools and API libraries which can access the memory of user keys and use of the cryptographic functionalities.