Choosing the Protection Level for Your Products

Your choice of the Sentinel protection keys to be distributed together with your licensed software reflects the level of protection you wish to apply and the way you intend to control the use of or access to each Product.

Two types of Sentinel protection keys are available:

>Sentinel HL keys: The hardware-based protection and licensing component of Sentinel LDK that provides the safest and strongest level of protection.

>Sentinel SL keys: The software-based protection and licensing component of Sentinel LDK—virtual Sentinel HL keys. Sentinel SL keys are further divided into AdminMode and UserMode keys

For more information on the different types of keys and a comparison of the benefits for each type, see End-User Keys.

Your software and the user license are both locked to the Sentinel protection key that you select. When you define the Product licenses to be included in your licensing plan, you also select which Sentinel LDK locking type to assign to each Product license. The locking type that you select determines the level of protection for each Product license as follows:

Locking Type	Level of Protection Provided
HL	Hardware-based level of protection.
SL AdminMode	Software-based level of protection.
SL UserMode
HL or SL AdminMode	Hardware- or Software-based level of protection. >If a Product is shipped solely with Sentinel HL keys, then a hardware-based level of protection is achieved. >If a Product is shipped even once with Sentinel SL keys, then the overall level of security should be considered to be that provided by SL keys. This is because there is always the possibility that an attacker could have access to a deployed SL key.
HL or SL (AdminMode or UserMode)

When installing an SL license: If the locking type that is specified for a Product license is HL or SL (AdminMode or UserMode) and the Run-time Environment is present on the user's machine, then SL AdminMode is selected automatically. Otherwise, SL User Mode is installed.