Secure product enablement over channels with narrow bandwidth

摘要

A system and method provide an enablement scheme that accommodates small bandwidth channels and does not rely on shared secrets between parties. This is accomplished by storing a table of messages on a vendor server and a table of hashes of the message on client machines. A process is used by the vendor to select a message from the table to use for a validation code for enablement, and an identical process is used by the client to find a corresponding hash in the hash table. By comparing the hash in the hash table to a hash of the validation code received, the client can verify the validation code. The system includes software portions for enabling the method.