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Posted by: Abu Ras on 2010-02-09, 01:59:06
A dongle is a small piece of hardware that connects to a laptop or desktop computer.[1] 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 adapter [2][3] 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. When using a dongle, it is necessary to emphasize the importance of making sure there is enough bandwidth to successfully run applications. |
