Dongle
A dongle is a small piece of hardware that connects to a computer.[1] Electrically dongles mostly appear as two-interface security tokens with transient data flow that does not collide with the dongle function and a pull communication that reads security data from the dongle. The usual function of a dongle is to authenticate a piece of software. Without the dongle, the software will run only in a restricted mode, or not at all. Dongles are used by some proprietary vendors as a form of copy protection or digital rights management, because it is much harder to copy a dongle than to copy the software it authenticates. Despite being hardware, however, dongles are not a complete solution to the trusted client problem. WORDCRAFT was the first program to use a software protection dongle, in 1980. Its dongle was a simple passive device that supplied data to the pins of a Commodore PET’s external cassette port in a pre-determined manner.
