dongle A device that ensures the legal use of an application program. It is usually attached to the printer port of the computer (between the port and the printer cable) and the program will not run in its absence. c From the Hutchinson Encyclopaedia. Helicon Publishing LTD 2000. All rights reserved. Dictionary search Search for: Saudi Arabia Flag The prophet Muhammad is said to have used a green banner. Past variants of the flag show two crossed swords. Effective date: 15 March 1973. >> A device that attaches to a computer to control access to a particular application. Dongles provide the most effective means of copy protection. Typically, the dongle attaches to a PC's parallel port. On Macintoshes, the dongle sometimes attaches to the ADB port. The dongle passes through all data coming through the port so it does not prevent the port from being used for other purposes. In fact, it's possible to attach several dongles to the same port. dongle: /dong_gl/, n. 1. [now obs.] A security or copy protection device for proprietary software consisting of a serialized EPROM and some drivers in a D-25 connector shell, which must be connected to an I/O port of the computer while the program is run. Programs that use a dongle query the port at startup and at programmed intervals thereafter, and terminate if it does not respond with the dongle's programmed validation code. Thus, users can make as many copies of the program as they want but must pay for each dongle. The first sighting of a dongle was in 1984, associated with a software product called PaperClip. The idea was clever, but it was initially a failure, as users disliked tying up a serial port this way. By 1993, dongles would typically pass data through the port and monitor for magic codes (and combinations of status lines) with minimal if any interference with devices further down the line - this innovation was necessary to allow daisy-chained dongles for multiple pieces of software. These devices have become rare as the industry has moved away from copy-protection schemes in general. 2. By extension, any physical electronic key or transferable ID required for a program to function. Common variations on this theme have used parallel or even joystick ports. See dongle-disk. 3. An adaptor cable mating a special edge-type connector on a PCMCIA or on-board Ethernet card to a standard 8p8c Ethernet jack. This usage seems to have surfaced in 1999 and is now dominant. Laptop owners curse these things because they're notoriously easy to lose and the vendors commonly charge extortionate prices for replacements. [Note: in early 1992, advertising copy from Rainbow Technologies (a manufacturer of dongles) included a claim that the word derived from "Don Gall", allegedly the inventor of the device. The company's receptionist will cheerfully tell you that the story is a myth invented for the ad copy. Nevertheless, I expect it to haunt my life as a lexicographer for at least the next ten years. :-( -ESR] dongle A dongle (pronounced DONG-uhl) is a mechanism for ensuring that only authorized users can copy or use specific software applications, especially very expensive programs. Common mechanisms include a hardware key that plugs into a parallel or serial port on a computer and that a software application accesses for verification before continuing to run; special key diskettes accessed in a similar manner; and registration numbers that are loaded into some form of ROM (read-only memory) at the factory or during system setup. If more than one application requires a dongle, multiple dongles can be daisy-chained together from the same port. Dongles are not in frequent use partly because enterprises don't like to have a serial or parallel port preempted for this use. A dongle is a small hardware device that connects to a computer to authenticate some piece of software. This was its primary meaning in the computer industry in the 1980s and 1990s. 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. Dongle can also refer to something that plugs into a computer, especially something with wires that "hang" (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 RJ45 or RJ11 jack for an Ethernet or 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 and Wi-Fi antennas. Software protection dongles are typically used with very expensive packages (starting with about USD 500 and up) and vertical market software, such as CAD/CAM software, Digital Audio Workstation applications and some translation memory packages. Efforts to introduce dongle copy prevention in the mainstream software market were generally met with stiff resistance from users. Despite being hardware, dongles are not a complete solution to the trusted client problem. 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. History Chained parallel port copy prevention dongles. The word dongle has been used as a placeholder name since the 1970s. Its origin is unknown. The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition, says it is "probably [an] arbitrary coinage." Claims that it was derived from the name "Don Gall" are an urban myth popularized by a 1992 advertisement for Rainbow Technologies, a dongle vendor. Dongle as the name of a device was used well before 1980 within the telecoms industry to refer to BNC cable joiners of either sex (such as the RG58 cable used on 10 meg Ethernet). 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 cassette port in a pre-determined manner. That first dongle was invented and named by Graham Heggie in the UK. The two cubic inch pendrive named lodu (33 cm?) resin-potted first generation devices were called "dongles" by the inventor as there was no other suitable term to hand on the day. The device increased WORDCRAFT sales significantly. The distributor, Dataview Ltd., then based in Colchester, UK, then went on to produce a derivative dongle which became their core business. Dongles rapidly evolved into active devices that contained a serial transceiver (UART) and even a microprocessor to handle transactions with the host. Later versions adopted the USB interface in preference to the serial or parallel interface. According to a contributor claiming to be "Paul Handover, founder and managing director of Dataview Ltd.": Although I can't remember the precise date, I well remember the conversation that I was having with Graham Heggie when he used the term 'dongle' and my immediate response that we couldn't use it as a term as it seemed vaguely vulgar. But we did and it became the generic term for a software protection key. In fact our sales of Wordcraft didn't rise anything like "eight-fold" much more like a steady doubling of sales over about a 6 month period. The biggest rise in sales were from larger organisations who had only purchased a single copy of Wordcraft. One large organisation in East Anglia, a single user of Wordcraft, turned out to have the product installed on over 200 Commodore PCs. The other small amendment is that it didn't "make millionaires" of those involved. Certainly Peter Dowson, the author of Wordcraft, made a very good living out of the sales of Wordcraft for a number of years. But this was much more down to his commitment to a constant development of Wordcraft than the impact of the dongle. Finally, the idea of the 'dongle' came out of a visit that I had made to our Canadian distributors, Canadian Micro Distributors (just slightly unsure if I recall the name correctly), in Milton, Ontario. They had developed a software key in conjunction with their local university and I saw this cube-like device stuck on the cassette port on the back of the Commodore. They avoided my questions about what it was doing but I guessed it was a software key. Upon my return to the UK, I rang Graham and explained what I had seen. It took him only a few days to deduce what it was doing and make a prototype. So, ultimately, we have our Canadian friends to thank for the idea of the Dongle. Problems with software protection dongles Implementation problems There is the potential for weaknesses in the implementation of the protocol between the dongle and the copy-controlled software. It requires considerable cunning to implement this in a fashion that is not easy to crack. For example, naive implementations might simply define a function to check for the dongle, returning "true" or "false" accordingly, reducing the prevention scheme to a single bit value at one point in the program. Modern dongles include built-in strong encryption and use fabrication techniques designed to thwart reverse engineering. Typical dongles also now contain non-volatile memory - key parts of the software may actually be stored on the dongle. However, security researchers warn that dongles still do not solve the trusted client problem: that if you give a user the cryptographic ciphertext, the algorithm and the key, your cipher is likely to be breakable, even with the algorithm and key encoded in hardware. (Grand, 2000) User problems Dongles tie up a port on the host machine. This has been ameliorated to some extent by the adoption of USB, but is still a serious drawback. To get around this, most practical dongles include a replacement port, so as to become an inline device. In fields where dongle-controlled software is common, users often need more than one such application installed on a given computer. Manufacturers claim that multiple dongles can be successfully stacked or daisy-chained, but operational problems with stacked dongles are common. The number of dongles can also become physically problematic. There is the obvious problem of losing the dongle, rendering the copy-controlled software useless until a replacement can be obtained. This is particularly likely if one needs to swap dongles for different applications. USB dongles can also easily be bent when used on laptop computers, especially during the somewhat common act of lifting the front to look for something like a battery release switch. This article is based in part on the Jargon File, which is in the public domain. Dongles in pop culture Some unlicensed titles for game consoles used dongles to connect officially licensed cartridges to circumvent authentication chips embedded in the console that give restrictions on what software will run. In the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, John Connor used an ATM card with a dongle and used an Atari Portfolio palmtop computer to circumvent security on the ATM when making his transaction for arcade money.