License Keys Now Available in Dashboard

May 23, 2019

Hello everyone!

I have just finished to integrate the generation of license keys to the VGC website! Now, whenever I add a new eligible sponsor, license keys are automatically generated and available in the sponsor's dashboard:

https://www.vgc.io/dashboard

Note that if you were already a Silver Sponsor (or higher) at the time of this writing, your existing license keys are NO LONGER VALID. Indeed, I regenerated all the existing license keys due to both a bug in my code, and a design flaw. You should have received an automatic email, and your new license keys can be found in your dashboard.

The bug was subtle: it only had a 1 out of 256 chance to occur each time I generated a license key, reason why it went undetected for so long. To be precise, it occurred whenever the first 8 bits of some cryptographic signature were all zeros, in which case OpenSSL (the cryptographic library I use) did some optimization by not including the first byte in the signature, and my code parsing this signature failed to handle correctly this scenario. It is now fixed and seems to have affected only one of you (a sponsor had an '=' sign in one of his license key), but I regenerated all license keys anyway due to the design flaw explained below.

The design flaw was that the keys were tied to an email address: VGC 2020 would have asked you both your address email and your license key, and verify that the pair "license key + email address" was valid. But it turns out that some of you have already changed their email address! So an email address isn't an identifier as stable as I thought. Therefore, I decided to change my mind: keys are now self-contained and don't need any other information to validate.

Next step: automate the compilation of VGC on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with automatic upload to the website so that sponsors can download it! This will not be trivial, and should take a few weeks. Notably, I have to change which tool I use to generate Windows installers (the tool I was using so far doesn't allow for automation), and implement the upload/download system.

Thanks again for your support!

Boris