CompTIA Server+ SK0-005 Practice Question

In a signature-based model, the vendor signs the license data with its private key. When the application starts, it uses the vendor's public key to validate the digital signature inside the file. Any modification to the expiry date, feature list, or seat count changes the file's hash, causing signature verification to fail and the software to refuse to run. Node-locked licensing binds a license to specific hardware but does not necessarily protect the file from editing. Per-core licensing is simply a counting metric, and concurrent (floating) licensing relies on a network license server rather than local cryptographic validation. Therefore, signature-based licensing is the only option that meets the vendor's requirement for local, tamper-evident enforcement.