Keyless Activation – Doing Away With License Key Management

Managing WordPress sites is a lot of work, on a good day.

With so many moving parts, staying on top of it all can be, frankly, a little overwhelming.

To complicate matters, if you purchase WordPress Pro plugins, you’ve got the added complication of managing all those license keys.

Not any more, with ShieldPRO.

“I’m Gonna Party Manage License Keys Like It’s 1999″

It doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as Prince’s version, but it’s the reality of software licensing in 2018 2024.

The legacy of license keys haunts us from the good ol’ days of installing Window 95.

The problems with license keys are:

• License keys are clunky
• It’s next to impossible to memorize your license keys
• Activation with license keys is 100% manual

Why must we keep using license keys?

The answer is a simple one: it works and it’s technically easy to implement license keys verification.

Unfortunately it’s a huge pain in the proverbial for everyone. Everyone except for the software distributor.

Software distributors are not likely to fix this because it requires a significant investment to build a solution.

And, most WordPress developers are focused on their own products. As they should be! They won’t easily have time to develop a fancy solution like this. We use Easy Digital Downloads as our e-commerce platform, and they provide a software licensing add-on. This is based on the “license keys” paradigm.

We decided we didn’t want restrict ourselves to Easy Digital Download’s approach, and to try our hand at a bit of innovation. Luckily for you, innovation is our bread and butter 🙂

So what’s the alternative if we don’t have license keys?

We present: Keyless Activation.

Exclusive to ShieldPRO: Keyless License Activation

As we said, since we’re using Easy Digital Downloads, the only way to get an alternative to license keys is to build it.

With the next release of Shield Security Pro, you’ll no longer need your license keys. Sure, they’re still there in the background, but you wont need to use them anywhere or even think about them.

So how do you activate your licenses?

Instead of building up a collection of License Keys, you simply assign your available licenses to site URLs. That’s basically what’s happening behind the scenes anyway, but we’ve removed the responsibility on your part to assign keys to sites.

Here’s how it used to work:

1. Buy a Pro license
2. Receive an email with your new license key
3. Load up the license key page on the site you want to activate Pro
4. Enter the new license key and allow the system to verify it
5. Pro features are activated.

Here’s how it works now:

1. Buy a Pro license.
2. Add the URL of the site you want to license from inside your ShieldPRO account.
3. Pro features are automatically licensed on the site within 30 seconds.

Could it be any easier? We’re not sure it could be…

What are the benefits to you?

• You don’t have license keys to remember, manage, and store.
• You can see at a glance all sites that have licenses, regardless of the keys/separate purchases.
  This means if you have 2 or more separate purchases, they’re all brought together into 1 place.
• You can add/remove licenses to/from sites with ease.
• You can easily see which sites have licenses that are due to expire soon, and renew them as necessary.

But, I still want my license keys!

Sometimes it’s hard to let some things go. This is a new paradigm, and so you’ll need to do things a bit differently.

But what you do differently will be simpler, and there’s less of it to do.

When you view your sites in the ShieldPRO control panel you’ll see the license keys listed alongside the site URLs. They’re there just for informational purposes, but have no other use.

Is this secure? Can’t someone, somehow, steal my licenses?

Since keys are no longer required, no-one can steal anything from you.

To authorise or de-authorise a license on a site, you must have access to your ShieldPRO account.  There’s no way around this.

How does it all work behind the scenes?

I’m not going to lie… this took quite a bit of involved development to get all the right pieces lined up and working together.

Here are the basic principals of how it works.

1. You add a URL to your ShieldPRO account for a given Pro plugin.
2. The site in-question will send a “license check” request to ShieldPRO asking whether, for the given product, there is a pro license assigned to it.
3. ShieldPRO will lookup this site against the database of licenses and it’ll return a response of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ depending on whether or not it’s found.
4. Any request for a site lookup will involve a simple handshake between ShieldPRO and the site itself. This ensures that the requests are coming from the site-in-question, not from anywhere else.
   e.g. To authorise abc.com, there will need to be a WordPress site with a Shield Security plugin ready and waiting to respond to us at abc.com

Why does no-one offer Keyless Activation?

It’s non-trivial to develop this kind of solution, and so it’s easier to just use license keys and do what the rest of the world does. License keys generally work, afterall, so why change it?

We, personally, hate license keys and their management. So, this was always on our roadmap, along with a few other enhancements, but we have to do it in stages.

Does this affect Shield Central Pro licenses?

It doesn’t. In-fact, implementing Keyless Activation allowed us to significantly reduce complexity for Shield Central licenses.

How can I get Keyless Activation?

Keyless Activation comes into effect with release of Shield Security v6.6.

There is nothing more you need to do. All your existing licenses will remain active and going forward, if you need to add more licenses, you’ll be able to do this directly with the new Keyless Activation control panel.