WIBU-SYSTEMS

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WIBU-SYSTEMS AG is one of the leading company in protecting commercial software products against software piracy and illegal (non-authorized) use of copies. The protection principle is based on a hardware device which cannot be duplicated by the user and which is checked by the protected software while its execution. Such products are known as dongles. They are not avoiding the copying of the software files (see copy protection), so multiple installations and backups can be done without restrictions.

History

The company was found 1989 by Oliver Winzenried and Marcellus Buchheit; the company name is created from the first two characters of their last names. The headquarters are in Karlsruhe, Germany; offices are also in USA (Shoreline, WA near Seattle) and China (Shanghai). The company is privately owned by its founders.

The first product was introduced in 1989 as WIBU-BOX as part of a product named WIBU-KEY for the parallel port. The design demands were:

A long life architecture which can be easily expanded and adapted to other.
A safe hardware based on encryption and nearly impossibly to crack.
Easy-to-use to protect a software product. This included an API which was identical for many programming languages and a tool which could convert DOS executables to protect DOS executables without requiring the programming source.
Tools at the site of the user of the protected software which helps him to detect and test the required hardware device.
A single device can be used to protect different licenses even from different companies which have licensed the product.
A device can be used locally at a computer or supply the protection for specific number of users in a local network.

The company was founded without venture capital and started with the two founders only. In the first years the hardware platform was expanded to the serial interface, NEC PC-9800 hardware (Japan) and PCMCIA. The company was converted to a GmbH in 1991 and AG in 1995. In the second half of the 90ies, the hardware variant for USB was introduced, which is the standard today. All these WIBU-KEY products are still backwards-compatible to the first WIBU-BOX of 1989 as well as the API. So for example, a software product, developed in 1990 for DOS and protected by the WIBU-BOX for parallel port can be still used without recompilation on Windows XP, using the USB device.

Today (2006), WIBU-KEY can be used to protect software on all types of Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh and major Linux variants.

2001 Smart Shelter was introduced, a protection system to supply read-only documents. Originally it was designed for HTML-based documents and since 2005 also available for PDF documents.

2003 With CodeMeter, a second protection line, additionally to WIBU-KEY started. CodeMeter is a DRM solution which permits a high number (several hundreds) of licenses within one hardware device. The device is bought by the user of this software for a small amount; the licenses are transferred via Internet while the software is downloaded.

External links

[Official Site]
[CodeMeter portal]

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