16.12.2020

What To Use To Generate Email Verification Keys

Warning: this answer does not use a secure way to generate the activation key, but instead relies only on the random module. A simple way to obtain a secure value is using getrandomstring from django.utils.crypto (this is used to provide the default SECRETKEY when using startproject) or, if using python3.6, use the new secrets module. Nov 10, 2019  Here I pick some awesome and best fake email generators websites for you where you can easily create disposal emails in seconds. Lets visit the website and enter your desired name which you want to make email now after process you get your email ready put and use wherever you want.

What To Use To Generate Email Verification Keys Free

Generating and validating license keys is a common requirement for commercial desktop applications. This article shows a state of the art implementation in 2020. It is simple and cryptographically secure.

Scope

When you browse StackOverflow for licensing implementations, you frequently read the following warning:

No license scheme is 100% secure.

It is true. So, given that our task is ultimately impossible, we don't want to think about it for too long. At the same time, we want something that is reasonably safe.

This article is about registration codes that work offline. No phoning home to a license server. Even if you use a server, you likely don't want your app to stop working just because your user doesn't have internet for a brief while. To achieve this, you will need an offline way of validating licenses.

Cracks vs. keygens

There are several ways in which people can work around the copy protection in your software. The most common are cracks. These usually patch your application's executable, to trick it into believing that there is a valid license. Every desktop application can be fooled in this way. Fortunately, cracks usually only work for specific versions of an app (eg. 5.1.2 but not 5.1.3).

The worst case for software vendors are key generators. They can be used to create arbitrarily many valid serial numbers. If a keygen exists for your app, then your licensing algorithm is compromised beyond repair.

Partial key verification

To prevent keygens from working for all versions of your software, a commonly used technique is partial key verification. Under this scheme, you only use some bits to check the validity of a license key. For example, the first version of your app might only check the first character in each group of a product key:

If someone publishes a keygen for your app, then you can release a new version that checks the second character (say) for a different requirement:

This limits the potential damage of a single key generator. But it doesn't prevent other keygens from appearing for your new app version.

Key length

Historically, license keys had to be entered manually. For instance, when you bought Windows XP, you received a CD-ROM and a printed product key that you had to type in upon installation:

To make this workable, license keys had to be short and consist of simple characters such as A - Z and 0 - 9.

Nowadays, hardly anyone types in license keys by hand. When a user purchases your software, you send them an email. They either download the license key, or copy/paste it into your application. Because of this, the length of license keys has little practical relevance today.

Older articles about license verification spend a lot of brainpower on 1) encoding information in the limited-length license key, such as a maximum app version, and 2) on partial key verification. If we drop the requirement that license keys be easy to type, we can get a simpler and more secure solution.

A modern approach

At the end of the day, a license check boils down to code like the following:

Note that this even applies to more exotic solutions. For example, say your app's binary is encrypted and only valid license keys can 'decrypt' it somehow. Then license_key_is_valid() amounts to asking 'can this key be used to decrypt the binary?'.

We thus need to choose an implementation for license_key_is_valid(). Fortunately, modern cryptography gives us just the right tool for this: We can use RSA signature verification to sign the licensing data with a private key, then verify the signature with an associated public key.

Below is an example in Python that uses the rsa library. Because RSA is so ubiquitous, you should be able to easily port this to another language if required.

First, create an RSA key pair on your development machine. We use 512 bits here because it leads to shorter signatures. In practice, you probably want 2048 bits or more.

When a user purchases, generate a license key:

This prints the following:

Send this to your user. Then, in your application, check the validity of the license key as follows:

Once execution reaches the last line, you can trust that data was not tampered with. This lets you include information relevant to licensing in the data, such as a maximum app version to which your user is entitled.

The above code works as-is when you type it into one interactive Python interpreter session. In practice, you will have to ship the public key with your app and decide where the user will put the license key. These are just details however. The important parts of the implementation are all here.

Caveats & Summary

Assuming you use a large enough bit size, the above implementation should be safe from key generators. It is not immune to cracking however – as mentioned above, no desktop app is. If you want to make your app even more secure, you could look at obfuscation. This makes reverse-engineering and thus circumventing your copy protection more difficult.

Michael is the creator of fman, a cross-platform file manager. Frustrated with how difficult it was to create this desktop application, Michael open sourced fman's build system (fbs). It saves you months when creating desktop apps with Python and Qt. A few days of these months come from using fbs's well-integrated licensing implementation.

NOTE:Laravel version 5.7 has introduced out of the box Email Verification and account activation. If you are using Laravel version >= 5.7, Please use the inbuilt code for email verification. Tutorial here -> User Email Verification in Laravel 5.7

In this article we will cover on how to verify user’s email and activate the user account once they clicks on the account activation link sent in the email.

Before proceeding make sure you have the following ready.

Now Follow the very simple steps to make the verification system work.

Generate New Model and Migration for VerifyUser

We will be creating a new table in our database which will hold the verification / activation code that are appended in the URL and sent to the users. Let’s begin by generating the required Model and Migration file.

Running the above command in your project root on terminal will generate a Model class VerifyUser.php in the App folder, and since we have appened the command with -m option, this will also generate a migration file for our new table verify_users under database > migrations folder.

Modify the migration files and migrate tables.

Now let’s modify the newly created migration file create_verify_users_table.php to include the required fields.

Note that user_id will be the foreign key of primary key from the users table.

Also modify the migration file for the users table to include a new boolean field to maintain the status of account verification.

Once you are done with the migration, you can run the migrate command to create / modify your database tables.

With this, you should have the verify_users table created in your database with following structure.

and the users table should have been modified, and have following structure.

Define Eloquent Relations

We now have our tables ready and we also have Models created for those tables. Let’s now go ahead and specify the one-to-one relationship between User and VerifyUser Model.

Add following method to the User.php Model class

Add following method to the VerifyUser.php Model class

Send Verification Email on Registration

To send email’s make sure you have your mail properties set up in .env file of your project. Read Laravel Send Email Example

In Laravel all the emails sent by your application must be defined by a Mailable class. To generate one such class for our verify user’s email on registration. Let’s generate a class with artisan command. Run the given below command in your project root.

As this command is executed, A new Class named VerifyMail.php will be generated under App/Mail. This class will have a build method which defines which view file to send as email.

We have modified the name of view files as emails.welcome. We will create a emails folder under resources/views in which we will keep our email views. Also as you can see we have declared the $user as public and we are setting the variable in the constructor.

Whatever variables are declared as public are by default available in the view file. Thus we can directly refer to the $uservariable to get the user related data directly in the view file.

Let’s go ahead and create the view file to to send verification email. Create a new file verifyUser.blade.php under resources / views / emails and put following contents into it.

Now since we have necessary code ready to send verification email to user account. Let’s modify our Registration class to send emails.

Open RegisterController.php class located under App / Http / Controllers / Auth and modify it’s create method as follows

We are generating a new random token and storing it in the verify_users table against the user_id, After that we use the Mail facade to send send VerifyMail to the user’s email address.

Verify User Functionality (Route and Controller Method)

Let’s go ahead towards coding functionality of user verification, i.e. the code that will be executed when user clicks on the link sent to his email account.

Create a route entry, It will be better if you keep it together with your Authentication routes.

What To Use To Generate Email Verification Keys On Facebook

Since the functionality is related to User Registration we will create a new method verifyUser in RegisterController.php

verifyUser method accepts a token from the url and it goes ahead and finds the user that is associated with that token. It confirms that the user exists and is not verified yet and then goes ahead and changes the verification status in the database.

Various status and warning massages are clubbed when redirecting the user to display on the view file.

Restricting Un-Verified User Access

We now have our email verification and user account activation process in place, But there is just one more important thing that needs to be done before we can mark this complete.

We should not allow unverified user’s to access the application pages until they are verified.

Thus we need to apply checks at two places

  1. Just after user Login
  2. Just after new user Registration

Modify LoginController.php and override the authenticated method from AuthenticatesUsers

authenticated method is executed just after the user is authenticated. We will override this and will use this to check if user is activated. If not we will sign-out the user and send back to login page with warning message.

What To Use To Generate Email Verification Keys 2016

Modify RegisterController.php and override the registered method from RegistersUsers

registered method is executed just after the user is registered into the application, we will override and modify this to sign-out the user and send him back to login with status message.

Last we need to modify our login.blade.php file which is located under resources / views / auth . Add the following snipped to display the appropriate status messages.

Code Repo

Once you have implemented the Email Verification and Account Activation Functionality, You might find these tutorials useful to extend your Laravel Authentication Functionality.