sample

OUTDATED valid only for version prior 3.0.0

Sample use of license3j

This document describes via a simple example how to use license3j in your application to check the validity of a license. We assume that you are familiar up to some extent with public key cryptography and you read the introduction of license3j as well as the document that describes how to create key rings and how to encode license.

When the program is loaded you should load the encoded license programmatically (this is the only point where you can not use GPG and this is where you get license3j handy).

License3j can use external key ring file that is installed along with the Java file or a key ring file installed into the JAR file (as a resource) or you can programmatically load the license string in the java code by any means, you want to program.

The example will show you the code of Groowiki license checking. Note that this part of groowiki is not open source. This is in the edition part and even exposing the code that checks the license do not decrease the license enforcement capabilities. The code presented here may not be the last version of Groowiki, nevertheless, it still works as a demonstration example. Also note that some of the code (checking for null arguments, catching exceptions) was removed to ease readability of the examples.

The class that checks the license of Groowiki has a field:

import com.verhas.licensor.License;

. . .

 private License lic = null;

The public method checkLicense() uses this field:

1.    public void checkLicense() {
2.        String licenseFileName = config.getString("edition.license.file");
3.        lic = new License();
4.        lic.loadKeyRingFromResource("pubring.gpg", digest);
5.        lic.setLicenseEncodedFromFile(licenseFileName);
6.        checkDateAndVersionValidity();
7.        edition = lic.getFeature("edition");
8.    }

Line 2 gets the license file name. Line 3 generates a new license. This class is provided by license3j. It should be used to load the key ring and to set the encoded license file. Loading the key ring the call to method loadKeyRingFromResource() has two arguments.

4.        lic.loadKeyRingFromResource("pubring.gpg", digest);

"pubring.gpg" the name of the resource file that contains the key ring

digest the digest of the key ring

The key ring is a binary file. It is usually named pubring.gpg in your key management. You copy this file into the Java project so that it will be available as a resource and thus loadKeyRingFromResource() can load it. (Never copy your secring into your java project!) To load this safely you have to provide a second argument, a byte [] byte array that should contain the digest of the key ring. To get this array you can use license3j.bat. If you type

license3j decode --license-file=lic.txt --keyring-file=pubring.gpg

it will not only print the decoded open form of the license but also the digest of the key ring file in a format that can be copy/paste put into your Java code:

---KEY RING DIGEST START
byte [] digest = new byte[] {
(byte)0x83,
(byte)0x41, (byte)0xD1, (byte)0x19, (byte)0x92, (byte)0x7B, (byte)0xC0, (byte)0x91, (byte)0x8D,
(byte)0x46, (byte)0x99, (byte)0xFF, (byte)0x29, (byte)0x24, (byte)0x26, (byte)0x22, (byte)0x80,
(byte)0x0F, (byte)0x89, (byte)0xEB, (byte)0x1C, (byte)0x03, (byte)0x10, (byte)0x23, (byte)0x3A,
(byte)0x54, (byte)0xA3, (byte)0x8C, (byte)0x4A, (byte)0x61, (byte)0x61, (byte)0xB3,
};
---KEY RING DIGEST END

If you are debugging, not serious or for some other reason do not want this extra security check to be performed then you can pass null as second argument to method loadKeyRingFromResource(). For more information why you need to include your digest into the code and pass it to the key ring loading have a look at the page.

If you look at the API you can see that there are other versions of this method, namely the overloaded loadKeyRing() with different parameters that you can use to load the key ring from a file. All these methods check the digest of the file or bypass the check if you provide null instead of the digest.

The line 5 is used to load the license file itself:

5.        lic.setLicenseEncodedFromFile(licenseFileName);

The license file is encoded but this is a text file to ease the transfer via email. For example, a license file may look like this:

The name of this file has to be passed to the method setLicenseEncodedFromFile() but again there are many variations of this method you can use to move the license information into the memory of JVM. If you consult the JavaDoc API you will see that you can specify the license string itself as an argument to method setLicenseEncoded() or load the license string from a resource or from an input stream. At the end all these methods do the same: the license text will be loaded into License object and it will be decoded. If the file can not be found or the license cannot be decoded then the method will throw some exception. This can be IOException or some exception from the underlying crypto API.

The line 6 checks the date and the validity of the license. This is a code specific to he application and is not provided by the license3j library. You have total freedom to check the validity of a license. You can use dates, like issue date, validity date, validity end date, user count and so on. They are license that you can get via the method getFeature providing the key to the feature, like in the line 7:

6.        checkDateAndVersionValidity();
7.        edition = lic.getFeature("edition");

As a reference and to further help your education we present here an abbreviated version of the method checkDateAndVersionValidity():

1.    protected void checkDateAndVersionValidity() {
2.        String issueDate = lic.getFeature("issue-date");
3.        String today = getTodayString();
4.        LicenseDate todayLD = new LicenseDate(today);
5.        if (!todayLD.isLaterThan(issueDate)) {
6.            throw new IllegalArgumentException(
7.                    "Issue date is too late, probably tampered system time");
8.        }
9.        String validDate = lic.getFeature("valid-date");
10.        if (validDate != null) {
11.            LicenseDate validDateLD = new LicenseDate(validDate);
12.            if (todayLD.isLaterThan(validDateLD)) {
13.                throw new IllegalArgumentException("License expired.");
14.            }
15.        }
     . . .
16.    }

The class LicenseDate is a proprietary class of Groowiki that provides date comparison for dates provided in the format YYYY-MM-DD which is exclusively used for Groowiki licenses.

More or less this is all that license3j provides and that you should use. The details of license handling above features are up to other packages.

You may be interested in how to bind a license to the Ethernet address.

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sample

OUTDATED valid only for version prior 3.0.0

Sample use of license3j

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