Extracting a unique identifier from a PC using PHP without PECL?

Question

I need to distribute a PHP site and you want to control the installation. To do this, I extract a unique identifier based on the hardware of the machine on which the site is deployed, and sends this identifier to another site for verification.

How to extract a unique identifier without using the Win32 PECL API extension? Can someone direct me to any manuals or tutorials that show how this is done?

Answer 1

If you plan to limit where your application can be installed, you will have to encode it using something like Zend Guard . Otherwise, no matter what restrictions you enter, you can easily remove them.

Even if the encoding does not lead to the fact that a certain user will not be able to go to the source code.

Answer 2

By retrieving the hardware information, you will certainly show your script identification in hardware. PHP is too high a level to provide such functions (for example, you could not write a device driver in PHP, since there are no necessary software interceptors there).

The methods for obtaining physical fingerprints will be different for each OS and even hardware. A device present on an x86 PC might be called something else (or completely absent) on a PowerPC Mac). On Linux, you can use various bits from / proc, on Windows, you can try to replicate the fingerprints used by Microsoft to activate Windows, etc.

Basically, you open a huge can of worms that has never been too closed for a start. This is software. If someone wants to steal your code, they can and will be. Your defense must be perfect for all eternity, they just need to find one hole to get everything.

Answer 3

NuShere NuCoder allows you to encode and protect your PHP files in various ways. One of these options is a unique identifier for the equipment that it can create for the system.

SourceGuardian is another tool that provides good protection and is constantly updated. However, they only allow license files, domains, IP addresses, and MAC addresses to be bound, not hardware identifiers.

I have done extensive research in this area and often used these two tools. In my opinion, they are much better and offer more protection than Zend Guard, at a much lower price.