TheScarms^(tm) AppSentinel lets you quickly and easily create evaluation versions of your software and stop unauthorized copying and unregistered use of your programs!

Here's why you should add AppSentinel to all your applications:

• Users cannot copy or distribute your application without your permission.
  Registration information is unique to each computer. If your application is copied to another computer AppSentinel will expire it when its evaluation period ends! The user will have to officially register your application on that computer to continue using it.



• Flexible number of trial days or trial runs.1
  AppSentinel gives you complete control over the length of the trial period to use. Set the number of days and/or runs to allow and your application's evaluation period will expire accordingly.



• AppSentinel facilitates application rental.1
  Your application can expire at regular intervals based on the number of days you set. Users will have to re-register with you to renew their subscription for another interval. Charging your users on a periodic subscription basis is simple with AppSentinel.



• AppSentinel guards against users changing their computer's clock.2
  Attempts to stay within the evaluation or rental period by tampering with the computer's clock will fail! If a user turns back their computer's clock to a date or time prior to the last time they ran your application their trial period will immediately expire. Users will be forced to contact you to re-register your application.



• Registration doesn't rely on a single value.
  For maximum protection, AppSentinel requires two values to unlock your software. The first time your application is run on a computer a unique Evaluation ID is created. Also, a Machine ID is constructed from the computer's hardware serial numbers. These values uniquely identify the PC your application is installed on. To register, the user must send both these values to you.



• AppSentinel makes registering your application easy.
  To register and turn the demo version of your software into the full, non-expiring version, or to extend the use of your application by another rental period, the user sends you their Evaluation and Machine IDs. You run the AppSentinel Control Panel3 to produce the Registration ID which you return to them.

  The user enters the Registration ID into your application where it is validated by AppSentinel. Upon validation, your application will be registered. Your application can then turn on or off full/trial version features.

• AppSentinel's Registration IDs cannot be copied, shared or stolen.
  Copying a valid Registration ID and attempting to use it to register a second copy of your application will fail! The Registration ID used to unlock your software is derived from an Evaluation ID and Machine ID. Because these values are unique to each computer and copy of your application, a Registration ID cannot be copied or reused.



• Valid Registration IDs cannot be created by another AppSentinel owner.
  Every copy of the AppSentinelAdmin component uses a unique algorithm to generate Registration IDs. The AppSentinel and AppSentinelAdmin components are sold in pairs. For a given Evaluation and Machine ID, a Registration ID generated one copy of AppSentinelAdmin will only work with its matching copy of AppSentinel. It will not work with any other copies.

  Additionally, Registration IDs produced by the free, trial version of AppSentinel will not work with the paid, non-expiring version.

• AppSentinel redundantly stores registration information.4,5
  Registration data is written to multiple locations on the user's hard drive. Due to the high degree of redundancy used, registration information can be recovered even if one or more of these locations are deleted or become corrupt. Information is persisted to both the Windows Registry and multiple file system locations.



• Customize where information is stored.
  Registration information is persisted to numerous locations on the user's hard drive. You can specify the mask used to create the names of the files that hold this information. Your information will never be stored in the same place as someone else's. You can incorporate AppSentinel in multiple applications and keep each application's registration information independent and isolated.



• Registration information is encrypted.
  All registration data is encrypted before it is stored. Thus, attempts to decipher or change it will fail. Even if a user discovers your registration data, they will not be able to interpret it.



• AppSentinel Uses Fail Safe logic.
  AppSentinel always assumes your application is in evaluation mode. All logic is written so that if any portion of code fails, the result will be that your application is being evaluated or that the evaluation period has expired. Your application will never accidentally be thought to be officially registered.



• Protected from Reverse Engineering.
  AppSentinel is compiled to native code to protect against debuggers, decompilers, disassemblers, and other cracking tools. All character values within the DLL are encrypted so they cannot be recognized in hex editors. Additionally, all components are CRC (cyclical redundancy check) protected to prevent being patched.



• Easy to use ActiveX DLL.6
  AppSentinel is an ActiveX DLL (in-process COM component) that can easily be incorporated into your application. All properties and methods are intuitive and well documented. Completely annotated sample applications illustrating how to use AppSentinel are included.



• Time and User Tested.
  AppSentinel has been used by developers all over the world to create trialware and subscription based applications and to maximize profits by eliminating unauthorized copies of their applications.

1 The ability to limit your application's trial period by the number of runs and the application rental functionality is not available in AppSentinel Lite.

2 When AppSentinel is used in evaluation mode (not for application rental), if your trial period is based solely on the number of runs of your application, no back-clocking check is performed.

3 The AppSentinel Control Panel uses functionality in the AppSentinelAdmin DLL to create Registration IDs. You can use the Control Panel supplied or create your own means of invoking AppSentinelAdmin. The documentation shows how to call AppSentinelAdmin from VB, VB.NET or C# programs as well as Active Server Page/ASP.NET applications via a browser. The transfer of registration information and the generation of Registration IDs can also be done programmatically to minimize user intervention.

4 User's running applications incorporating AppSentinel V2.1 and earlier must have sufficient privileges to write information to the root, Windows and System folders as well as the Hkey_Local_Machine Registry hive. With subsequent versions this is also the case unless the optional "user level security" property is set. When set, AppSentinel does not write to these folders and uses the Hkey_Current_User Registry hive instead.

5 Registration information is stored in several places on the computer's hard drive. If some or all of the data in these locations is changed or deleted the registration information can usually be reconstructed. However, if all of the data stored in all of these locations is deleted or altered AppSentinel may not be able to reconstruct it. In this unlikely case, AppSentinel will infer your application is unregistered and will expire it after its trial period.

6 AppSentinel, AppSentinelTrial, AppSentinelAdmin, AppSentinel Control Panel and sample applications are written in Visual Basic 6.0 Service Pack 6 and require you to distribute the Visual Basic 6.0 Runtime with your application. COM components must be registered on the user's PC. You must have the VB 6.0 or .NET development environment installed to open and run the sample applications.