Hardware IDs

A license is bound to the device that activated it, through a hardware fingerprint built from several hardware characteristics of that device. Knowing roughly how this works tells you what to expect when a customer's hardware changes, and what to tell them when a license stops matching.

What can change without breaking a license

Routine hardware changes do not invalidate a license. Replacing a network adapter or swapping a disk, for example, still leaves the fingerprint close enough to match. Reinstalling the operating system or moving to a different machine, however, makes the device count as a new one: the fingerprint no longer matches, and validation returns BAD_CONTEXT. The remedy is to deactivate the old identity and activate again on the new one. Until it is deactivated, the old seat stays held, so make deactivation easy for your customers to find in your product.

Privacy

No raw hardware identifiers ever leave the device. The SDK sends and stores only irreversible cryptographic hashes of each hardware characteristic, so activation cannot leak MAC addresses, serial numbers, or machine identifiers. This is worth telling privacy-conscious customers directly: the service never sees, and could never recover, the underlying hardware values.

Cloud instances and virtual machines

Virtual machines and cloud instances carry a machine identity like any other operating system installation, so licensing works the same way. Cloned images, however, share the same fingerprint until they are re-provisioned, and ephemeral instances that activate and then disappear hold their seats until their licenses lapse. For elastic fleets, floating licenses with short lease periods are a better fit: seats free themselves automatically when an instance goes away.

ARM devices

ARM devices, including Windows-on-ARM and Apple silicon, are fully supported.