Registration for Cocoa shareware

Question

What is the best way to protect a Cocoa shareware application from software piracy? Are there developer libraries/tools out there for this task?

Answer 1

Allan Odgaard - using openssl for license keys is one way to do it.

Answer 2

AquaticPrime is a simple, easy Cocoa licensing framework. It uses securely signed plist's as it’s “license key”, which makes it simple to embed arbitrary information into the license.

With AquaticPrime one would generally distribute the license as a small file, rather than as a text string, which may be an advantage or disadvantage for your application.

The framework includes code to generate licenses in C#, Carbon, Cocoa, PHP, Python, Ruby and STL. It also includes a GUI one-off license generator. My experience with it has been great.