Dongle

A dongle is a small hardware device that connects to a computer to authenticate an item of software.[1] Dongle may also refer to something that plugs into a computer and converts a small (often proprietary) port or plug into a larger standard plug. Dongles tend to consist of two connectors that are attached to one another by a length of cable that that hangs (dangle) from a laptop computer. For example: * A jack wired to a small edge connector on a Type I or II PCMCIA card, typically an 8P8C modular connector for an Ethernet cable or RJ11 jack for a telephone cable. This type of dongle has no copy prevention purpose. PCMCIA card dongles are notoriously fragile and unreliable. They are falling out of favour as more laptops include built-in Ethernet and modem sockets. * USB adapters, such as for memory cards. * Other USB devices, primarily flash memory drives, used only for data storage (as opposed to USB Hardware Token Devices). * The word has also been applied to Bluetooth, Wi-Fi antennas and Infrared transceivers. * It is also been used to refer to ATI CrossFire Interconnects

software protection dongle

A dongle is a small hardware device that connects to a computer to authenticate a piece of software. When the dongle is not present, the software runs in a restricted mode or refuses to run. Dongles are used by some proprietary vendors as a form of copy prevention or digital rights management because it is much harder to copy the dongle than to copy the software it authenticates. Vendors of software protection dongles (and dongle-controlled software) often use terms such as hardware key, hardware token, or security device in their written literature. In day-to-day use however, the jargon word "dongle" is much more commonly used.

• Softkey Glossary:
  • Copy protection
  • cryptography
  • digital signature
  • Dongle
  • security token
  • smart card
  • Software protection
  • software protection dongle