Usb Dongle
A dongle is a small piece of hardware that connects to a laptop or desktop computer. It is a portable device and is often close to the appearance of a USB flash drive. Although earlier use of dongles was to authenticate a piece of software, the word dongle is now widely used to refer to a broadband wireless adaptor or in general to connectors that translate one type of port to another. The term dongle can also refer to audio recording connectors.
Electrically, the authentication dongles mostly appear as two-interface security tokens with transient data flow that does not interfere with other dongle functions and a pull communication that reads security data from the dongle. These are used by some proprietary vendors as a form of copy protection or digital rights management, because it is generally harder to replicate a dongle than to copy the software it authenticates. Without the dongle, the software may run only in a restricted mode, or not at all. Despite being a hardware device, dongles are not a complete solution to the trusted client problem.
Electrically, the authentication dongles mostly appear as two-interface security tokens with transient data flow that does not interfere with other dongle functions and a pull communication that reads security data from the dongle. These are used by some proprietary vendors as a form of copy protection or digital rights management, because it is generally harder to replicate a dongle than to copy the software it authenticates. Without the dongle, the software may run only in a restricted mode, or not at all. Despite being a hardware device, dongles are not a complete solution to the trusted client problem.
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