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EA Protection Audit Checklist
Twelve years of "protect your EA" advice mostly repeats the same three tips. This is a real audit checklist — run it against whatever you're using today, LicenseFort or not.
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1. Where the check actually runs
- The license check happens server-side on every run, not just once at compile time or install.
- A cracked or hex-edited copy can't just skip the check locally — the server has to actually say yes.
- You've tested revocation for real: revoke a live key and confirm the software stops working, not just assumed it would.
2. Binding & sharing
- Licenses are bound to a device or trading-account identifier, not a naked serial anyone can copy-paste.
- Seat/device limits are enforced with a real, working reset flow — so a customer who reformats a PC isn't punished as if they were pirating.
- You can tell the difference between "one customer, two machines" and "one license, forty machines."
3. Resilience against tampering
- The check isn't a single conditional an attacker can patch out with one edit — there's more than one place that has to agree.
- Trial/expiration dates are checked against a source you control, not just the local system clock.
- You're not relying on obscurity alone ("nobody will bother reversing this") as your only defense.
4. Failure handling
- You've explicitly decided what happens when your license server is unreachable — fail open with a grace window, or fail closed — instead of it being whatever the code happens to do.
- That decision is documented somewhere your customers can actually read it, not just in your head.
- A real outage on your end doesn't lock out paying customers who did nothing wrong.
5. Ongoing visibility
- You can see validation and activation activity — who's checking in, roughly from where, on what.
- You can see blocked or rejected attempts specifically — that's your actual piracy signal, not total traffic.
- You have an answer, even an informal one, for what happens to your licensing if you ever have to shut down or migrate providers.
Scoring yourself honestly: most DIY setups pass section 1 and fail somewhere in 3–5. That's normal — those are the parts that take real infrastructure, not just a code snippet.
Read the full breakdown in How to Protect Your MT4/MT5 EA From Piracy, or see how LicenseFort covers sections 1–5 out of the box on the MT4/MT5 page.