At its core, Padlock is a license generation and validation engine designed to easily integrate into a wide variety of Java applications.
Step 1: KeyPair Generation
Padlock’s security is based off of using the standard public key cryptography libraries built into Java. Each KeyPair contains a public key and private key, with each serving a unique purpose. The private key is used to sign licenses, and the public key is used to verify them. With this setup, once a license is signed by the private key it cannot be modified without detection. This ensures that Padlock licenses are authentic and unmodified.
Padlock comes with three key generation methods: The great Swing based Padlock Manager, the Padlock Command Line Tools, or right in the Padlock API.
Step 2: License Generation
Padlock allows you to custom design the license and its properties to serve and protect your business logic. Licenses can contain any number of custom parameters that cannot be modified by the end user. Easily embed items such a product identification, version information, purchase date, customer data, or anything else required by your application. Padlock Licenses also contains start and expiration dates, hardware locking, and floating expiration dates (for offering 30/60/90 day demos).
Much like the KeyPair generation, Licenses can be generated from Padlock Manager, the Command Line Tools, or programmatically via the Padlock API.
Step 3: Padlock Integration
Once the specifics of the License data has been ironed out, integrating Padlock into your Java application or library is easy. Embed the public key String into your code, import the License from a File, String, or any InputStream instance, and then create a new Padlock Validator to validate the license. Padlock will run a series of tests against the license to determine its status, and will return a set of individual test results along with a description for each.
For more information on using and integrating Padlock, check out the documentation page.
