Ameliorating Software Piracy-A Block chain based Approach

The advent of software programs has also brought forth the problem of software piracy. Traditionally software programs have faced a lot of challenges to prevent software from piracy. Preventing software piracy through online servers is also vulnerable to attacks. These attacks target the server or trick the software by masquerading as the real server. Using a decentralized public ledger for software license validation can overcome this issue and provide a robust mechanism to prevent software piracy. In this paper, we advocate the use of smart contracts on the block chain along with the Software Hash, the Hardware ID (HID) and the License key to authenticate the user and allow access to the software. This authentication mechanism can help prevent duplication of software and disincentive credential sharing. An experiment conducted with the help of two case studies further attests to the advantages of using this method.