GcSLV : Garbled circuit based Software License Validation

Secure distribution of software among an exclusive set of subscribers is an important problem in the IT industry. Software licensing is a tool to combat piracy by provisioning legitimate users with the license file to access the software. Existing licensing schemes are prone to license key confiscation and bypassing of license validation code attacks by software pirates. To counter piracy, the validation logic needs to be be in encrypted form. This can be achieved using a Yao's garbled circuit. In this paper we propose a licensing scheme: Garbled circuit based Software License Validation (GcSLV) along with Identity based Elliptic Curve Cryptography. We implemented GcSLV and conducted performance evaluation on desktop and mobile platforms. Further we demonstrate through experimentation that performance of GcSLV is efficient than the existing licensing scheme specifically for license validation.