Hello everyone. I'm trying to determine the best course of action to implement a simple "licensing" system with a partner of mine. The concept is:

Generate an encrypted value based upon several internal hardware components. Have the customer send this value to us which we will implement into our key generator. Once we have that, we add any other restrictions on the license (user, expires, etc.). From there we generate a file which we send to the customer they can add to their installation and voila, happy people about.

I have the first part all done. My next part is trying to figure out which encryption methodology I would need to use. I already know Symmetric Encryption is pretty much the only route I can take. Most of the information I have found involves .NET already creating a key from its own internal methods.

That's a bit of background, my question is: "Which encryption method could I use which would allow me to encrypt the restrictions based upon the "id" I was given from the customer's computer?" I'm writing this in C# by the way.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Take Care!