Terminology

If you are a Didact customer who purchased a paid plan of the platform, there is some imporant terminology to learn so that you understand the various components of the licensing system.

Didact Console

To assist paid users/customers with various activities, the Didact Platform provides a SaaS application called Didact Console. Didact Console is comprised of both a web dashboard application and a backend REST API. Its various functions include:

• Hosting the licensing server for automated license key generation.
• Hosting the licensing server for license key checks.
• Billing and subscription management.

Didact Console might be used for other customer-facing features later on that don't really belong in the main applications of the platform as well.

Didact Console is required for customers to acquire their license keys; however, it is not required for free/Community Edition users.

License server

As mentioned above, Didact Console exposes a license server for customers that require license keys. This license server is essentially a REST API that dispenses, authenticates, and validates license keys for Didact Engine to allow it to unlock enhanced features.

The license server is exposed as a set of endpoints in Didact Console's REST API. As a Didact user, you should not have a need to call these endpoints directly; instead, Didact Engine communicates with them internally.

The license server is built with resilience and reliability in mind. If you would like to see its current uptime status, feel free to check out the Didact status page and read Uptime and Alerting.

License key

The license key is the unencrypted, simple API key that you get from Didact Console once you purchase a paid plan for Didact.

This key is tied to your organization account in Didact Console and is necessary for you to unlock the paid features of Didact.

An example license key is shown below:

didact_73aafe0c-b882-4912-9422-4e7e8405f072_3Ji7hPaVXJfUtzID9mB2gWDsRayW2jcsn1oVL0cK

Keep it secret, keep it safe

Your license key is a secret key that you should not share with anyone outside of your organization. It is a secret key used only in Didact Engine and/or Didact CLI, so don't expose it on the frontend, don't accidentally commit it to version control, and only use it in CI/CD systems when proper secret storage mechanisms are used.

Smart key

When license keys are successfully authenticated with Didact's license server, the license server returns smart keys.

Smart keys are asymmetrically-signed JSON payloads with important customer metadata, key metadata, and paid plan metadata about using the enhanced modes of Didact.

Didact Engine contains a hard-coded public key that is used to verify the cryptographic signature of your smart keys to ensure that they are legitimate and sourced from Didact's own license server.

Asymmetric encryption

Asymmetric encryption is a special form of encryption used to encrypt and validate data.

In asymmetric encryption, a cryptographic system generates a key pair, namely, a private key and a public key.

The private key is the special, secret key that is securely stored, never shared, and used to encrypt data.

The public key is a shareable key used for signature validation by users of the cryptographic system. Essentially, a public key looks at a piece of asymmetrically-encrypted data and verifies that the data was encrypted by its private key brother.

Asymmetric encryption is used extensively all throughout the computing world and is a popular flavor of encryption for the vastly successful Json Web Token (JWT) authentication system used in modern web apps.