I would suggest the following to the Steinberg developers to implement a secure licensing system by software: The licensing application could pair:
- The username and password from the Steinberg customer area, and…
- The combination of the most significant pieces of hardware of the computer scanned with serial numbers of, e.g. motherboard with its serial number, SSD with its serial number, etc…
From their customer area online, the customer can manage their computers on which they can install the application, e.g. license for 1 or 2 computers. If they need to replace an SSD, they just delete the current computer profile from the customer area, replace the faulty SSD, rescan the computer hardware to recreate a computer profile, and then assign the license to the new profile.
This concept could be enhanced, but I think this would be safe for Steinberg to protect their intellectual property, and this would be convenient for the end users, effectively getting rid of the dongle.