Solutions

Offline Software Licensing

For customers on air-gapped machines, secure facilities, or anywhere internet access can't be assumed at every launch. A signed offline token is verified entirely on the device — no network call, no dependency on your license server being reachable.

Who this is for

If any meaningful share of your customers run your software on machines with no internet access — defense, industrial control systems, secure government facilities, on-prem enterprise deployments behind a strict firewall — a validate-on-every-launch API call simply doesn't work. Offline activation is the answer: issue a token once, verify it locally forever.


How it works

  1. Customer generates a hardware fingerprint and sends it to you (email, support portal)
  2. You generate a signed token for that specific device from the PermitCore admin panel
  3. Customer's app calls ActivateOffline(token) — the SDK verifies the signature and stores it locally
  4. Every subsequent launch verifies the cached token offline — no internet needed, ever again

Tokens are signed with ECDSA P-256 / SHA-256, IEEE P1363 raw signature format, over the UTF-8 bytes of a base64url-encoded JSON payload (pc_offline_v1.<payload>.<signature>). All 6 SDKs implement this identically — verified against a shared, versioned set of cryptographic test vectors, not just each SDK's own hand-rolled tests.

Honest trade-off: an offline token can't be instantly revoked on a genuinely air-gapped machine — the token has to expire. Use short validity windows (30–90 days) for sensitive deployments, longer for low-risk ones. There's no way around this; any vendor claiming instant offline revocation is describing something that isn't actually offline.

What's verified, and how

PropertyHow it's achieved
Tamper-proofECDSA P-256 signature — any modification invalidates it
Device-boundPayload includes the device ID — SDK rejects tokens for other machines
Time-limitedexpiresAt checked by both the SDK and an optional server verify endpoint
Revocable when onlineToken ID tracked server-side — a machine that regains connectivity can check revocation

Ship offline activation without writing crypto

Included from the Professional plan. Free tier available for evaluation.