Although USB Dongles may appear to be the ultimate software privacy prevention tool, they are not. Hackers can bypass USB Dongles by creating a “Virtual USB Dongle” and then reverse engineering the communications between HAast and the USB Dongle. In 2015 Telium discovered that it’s HAfs software was being openly exchanged on BitTorrent, with a virtual USB Dongle which bypassed our security. Since that time, our license service provider has updated their technology to try to prevent any attempt to use a fraudulent USB dongle. However, hackers are quite resourceful so this is an ongoing battle.
The third party license library we use now detects the presence of a “shim” between the library and the USB Dongle. The presence of any shim will trigger a bypass detection error, and will cause the software to refuse to communicate with the USB Dongle. Since retail (end user) sales cannot use USB Dongles for licensing, this should only affect sales through Telium partners (OEM/ITSP/VAR).
If you have purchased through a Telium partner, please contact the partner for assistance. Telium may issue a license which allows the presence of a “shim”, only if the partner can confirm a long-term and trustworthy relationship with you, the customer. We recognize that there are some legitimate use cases for a USB “shim” (e.g. use of USB over IP devices in data centers), but the financial risk to Telium is significant, so by default we do not allow our software to communicate with USB Dongles in the presence of any USB “shims”.
If you do not qualify for a license which allows the use of USB “shims”, please consider use of Telium’s Volume License Server product. This allows USB Dongles to be placed off-host, and is fully compatible with virtualization/containerization/etc.
