We have been advised by the company that hosts our electronic licence activation server that they have recently enforced some security updates that may impact the activation and deactivation of electronic licences from older operating systems.

“Industry standards now require increased security in encryption protocols to keep data safe. We are legally-obligated to comply ​with these increased security requirements, and doing so requires changes to our hosting infrastructure​.”

What Operating Systems are Affected?

Effectively immediately TLS 1.0 is no longer supported for secure connections to their licensing servers. Secure access to their licensing servers is only possible from systems that support TLS 1.1 or TLS 1.2.

Here is a summary of the new operating system requirements:

• Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 or newer with Internet Explorer 11 or newer is required.
• It is possible to use Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 with Internet Explorer 10, but users may need to adjust settings on their computer to enable support.
• Windows XP / Windows Server 2003 R2 or earlier, or Internet Explorer 9 or earlier do not support the newer, required standards.

For operating systems that do not support TLS 1.1 or TLS 1.2 the activation/deactivation processes may fall-back to a less secure connection method. However, if this fails the only solution will be to update the operating system to one that is supported.

Note: This change only affects activations and deactivations. Licences that were activated prior to this change will continue to function normally.