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Using License Tokens to validate licensing on your services

  • Article

License Tokens within the Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) runtime provide a means for a game service to validate that the client has a valid license for the running app without having to trust the client. These tokens are intended for validating licenses for apps that are running on PC and aren't needed for Xbox apps.

A License Token is formatted as a JSON Web Token (JWT) and can be unpacked by using the available JWT handlers. For a validation test, you can enter a License Token into the JWT decoding tool at http://jwt.io.

A License Token has the sections that are shown in the following table.

Section Description
Header Provides the x5t that's used to determine the correct certificate to use for validating the token.
Payload Contains a base64-encoded string in the LicenseTokenClaim value that gives additional information about the license from the client. Also provides the expiration date of LicenseToken.
Signature Standard JWT signature for validating the integrity and source of the token. Use the public cert of the signing certificate that's downloaded from Microsoft for validation.

Obtaining a License Token from the client

To obtain a License Token, the client must call the XStoreQueryLicenseTokenAsync API that's passing in the Store ID of the product and a custom developer string, which is described in more detail later in this topic. This API then retrieves a License Token for the app that's based on the user who's currently signed in to the Microsoft Store app. If you're working in a development sandbox, your test account must be signed in to both the Xbox Windows app and the Microsoft Store app. When the token is retrieved, it should then be sent to your own service to be validated. License Tokens shouldn't be validated on the client because that would negate the trust of the results that are coming from the client to your service.

For an example of how to obtain a License Token, see the In-Game Store sample.

Validating a License Token on your service

For a full code example of how to handle License Tokens, see the Game Service sample.

You need to obtain the RSA public key from the certificate that was used to sign the token. To determine the full URL to download the certificate, you need to determine certificateId in one of the following ways.

  • Extract the certificateId value within the base64-encoded payload.
  • Base64-decode the x5t value from the header into a byte array, and convert it to a string. Example code of how to do this is provided in the Game Service sample.
  • After you have certificateId, take that value in the decoded string and then append it to https://licensing.mp.microsoft.com/v8.0/licenseToken/fullCertificate/{certificateId} to get the direct download link of the certificate.

The result is an XML document with the raw certificate data that can then be used to create a certificate object such as X509Certificate2 (see the Game Service sample for example code). You should cache this certificate, eliminating the need to download it each time that a License Token is validated.

With the RSA public key of the certificate, you can then use standard JWT signature validation to ensure that the License Token is from a reliable source and the contents of the token are unmodified.

Using the information within the License Token

The payload of the License Token contains a LicenseTokenClaim value that's a base64-encoded string of additional JSON data. The first part of the string can be ignored after decoding, so look for the first "{" to denote the beginning of the JSON data. This is shown in the following example.

[Unicode character string that can be ignored]
{
    "certificateId": "C4FC9E583CC4D5FEB96712619B5BE7499FECB5FA",
    "customDeveloperString": "anti-replay string",
    "licensableProducts": [
        {
            "endDate": "9999-12-31T23:59:59.9999999+00:00",
            "isShared": false,
            "id": "fc80277459b04bc7a158b49c0c5574e1",
            "productId": "9NN4ZHKML55R",
            "skuId": "0010",
            "userId": "m8jGdShdpG8vu9nIQiAn3lBIQJ+TD0r2jAJvfmGYmGI="
        }
    ],
    "payload": "T3Jqb3H+YHkjgBksJcsBaL6noHabm5JfyCYaV9nnV+XTiAzNfHKCdUqK2KZkZNk7aYfsVJ0CL2mFQg8XdYtxOv+YmHi+6qhXv6Wp5mx3e4+ZFavbobwjPbVgVsKpDV3TxKdUCIhVPPtDOziqWsUB3+z4plopXM+SargAqqBchQOQklRf5z4NXkAqWer31MmZWwXeEcsfH7Ac/usMlrQakT1IepxnR7+bZIKzp7B9QcWN2lJzyP4TYg8gVnYBGT9cRWxy/IgY0gL5FYNLnDJM1A3D2JcmsCsKuCVpzzn2eXdSAGha00oqBdCcQMr34da54x1s47lvZTdP+Z4Z/BjSQw==",
    "tokenVersion": 1
}

If the client has a valid license for the product, it's returned as a result in the licensableProducts list. The endDate value is represented in UTC time and the payload string is reserved for future use.

Preventing replay attacks with the customDeveloperString parameter

Because a client could intercept the transmission of a valid token to your service and then replay that valid token, it's important to properly use the customDeveloperString parameter of the XStoreQueryLicenseToken API. This string should be generated on your server and be unique for each license check that you want to do. After the string has been generated, it should be sent down to the client who then passes the string to the XStoreQueryLicenseToken API. The value is then embedded into the License Token's payload. It's protected there from being modified by the validation signature on the token.

After the client sends the token up to your service, you can check that the customDeveloperString value exactly matches the value that the server generated and sent to the client. If this value doesn't match, it might indicate a replay of an old token in an attempt to deceive the service because all other aspects of the token are still valid. We recommend that customDeveloperString be a random string or GUID for each license check that's performed.

See also

Commerce

XStore

XStoreQueryLicenseTokenAsync

XStoreQueryLicenseTokenResult