Hey guys,

I am still very new to coding and I have way more experience in reverse engineering ( cracking ) software than I actually do coding it. I began toying with reversing software when I was much younger and enjoyed the challenge it presented and today that challenge is not in cracking software but learning how to protect against it, specifically in .net applications, and help protect the intellectual property of developers.

With that said, I have ideas in my head that sound great in order to prevent crackers ( like myself ) from being able to crack software and make it work and then share it across the internet freely. With that said, I also know that what we can create can also be undone. So I know what I'm up against here.

My question is that I have some ideas floating in my head about what it would take to make a software 'virtually uncrackable' and until now that was taking part of the application server-side and so even if they bypassed registration routines and multiple software checks, the software was rendered useless because they couldn't access the server-side information.

I know there are flaws with even that system and so I'm wondering if it's possible to create an executable on the fly server-side that is specific to a machine. For instance, let's say I'm selling 'Widget X' and someone finds the installer or buys it and shares it, what I want to have happen is that the installer is really useless without this custom generated exe that happens on my server specifically for each machine it runs on.

So you buy 'Widget X', you get download link to installation utility. After installing you run main application and it does several hardware checks and generates a unique encrypted code based on the hardware ids it collects. This is unique to one machine only and no two will be identical.

The software then goes to our licensing server and generates a unique executable based on the input from the software and installs to users machine. That software has their unique code inside and then begins the normal routine of verification based on machine id, the id inside software to match, what the server shows as the true id, and hidden checks to verify that the software they have is not tampered with.

Does this make sense and is it plausible?

Chris