| The following questions are answered on this page: CADVault for AutoCAD is an add-on utility for AutoCAD, the world's most popular CAD program. CADVault works on top of AutoCAD and adds certain functionality and user interface elements. In plain AutoCAD, everyone who gets access to a drawing file is able to view, print and edit each and every line contained in the drawing. Using CADVault, they need your permission to do so. You are able to secure all or part of any AutoCAD drawing you create. Securing drawing elements restricts the things other people can do with your design. The price of a CADVault for AutoCAD license is dependent on where you are located, how many licenses you need, and how the license should be delivered to you. CADLock, Inc. works with local distribution partners around the globe who not only provide you with the software licenses, but also give online and telephone support in your local language. Due to the different costs of local language support and marketing, the price for a software license is a bit higher in some countries, and a bit lower in others. Please query our online pricelist to learn about your local price. Within the pricelist you will find prices for a single-user license and a site license. The single-user license allows you to install the software on one AutoCAD workstation. If you want to use the software on two workstation, you need to buy two single-user licenses. The site license allows you to install the software on all workstations in your office, and on all other workstation your company owns at your site, i.e. your office's street address. The site license provides a cheap way to ensure all your AutoCAD users can secure their drawings using CADVault for AutoCAD. In addition, the pricelist contains different prices for the online version of the software and a physical shipment on CD. Because it is cheaper for us when you download the software, you benefit from a better price for the online version. If you want to test the software using your own drawings, feel free to download the free evaluation version from our download center. The evaluation version is limited in that locked drawing contents is not secure, but other than that it is completely identical to the real version. In fact you can convert the evaluation version to a secure one by purchasing a license key and authorizing the software without reinstall. If you prefer a demonstration, preferably in your local language, contact the CADLock distribution partner located near you. To find them, go to the online pricelist and enter your country and region. The system will tell you the name and address of your local reseller and how to contact them. Using CADVault, you can restrict what others can do to your drawing. There are various AutoCAD functions you can selectively allow or forbid for all or parts of your drawing. In addition, you can specify different sets of permissions that are effective, depending on who accesses your drawing. Furthermore, CADVault embeds your name, contact information, and any kind of notice you want to add (such as a copyright notice) into your drawing. This information cannot be deleted from the secured objects and therefore always documents your ownership and rights wherever the drawing may go. If you want to, you can have recipients of your drawing agree to an individual user agreement before they are able to see or work with your data. And you may even define an expiration date after which the drawing content becomes invalid. Using digital signatures, you are able to sign individual parts of your drawing. You can also allow others to countersign your design, e.g. having your boss approve what you draw. Using CADVault you can, among other things: - Lock valuable and important parts of your design to prevent unwanted modifications
- Prevent unauthorized access to secured drawing elements
- Add copyright or legal notices to which users of the drawing must agree
- Include secret design elements to be seen by your eyes only
- Digitally sign, co-sign or approve drawings
- Create components that clients can use in their drawings but cannot explode or modify
- Protect your commercial symbol libraries
More specific scenarios and examples of use will be added soon. No. Unlike our previous AutoCAD security product, CADLock SE, CADVault does not use a special file format. Instead, the drawing elements you want protected are stored in secure vault objects inside conventional DWG files. This means that if you are contractually obliged to provide DWG files, you can now do so while still retaining control over those files. A CADVault "vault object", sometimes referred to as a "CADVault", is an electronic vault that safely stores valuable parts of your design so that nobody can access, use or modify the secured content without your permission. In most respects a vault object is like a physical vault: once the vault is locked, a key is required to access its contents. Even the CADVault programmers cannot access the information in your vault unless they are given the key. In AutoCAD terms, a vault object is a custom object that behaves very much like a block. When the vault is created, a selection set of drawing entities is provided. Like a block, the vault object can display an image of the objects it contains, and like a block you can move or copy the vault as a single entity. If you created the vault, you can even explode it like a block. Unlike a block, however, other people cannot view, move, or explode a vault object unless they have your explicit permission to do so. By default a vault object is only accessible to its owner or creator. Since a vault is a custom AutoCAD object type, recipients of your drawing need a small application called an object enabler to enable complete functionality of the vault object (to the extent you have allowed). Without the object enabler installed, a vault is still completely secure and becomes an AutoCAD proxy object with graphics that you set when the vault is created. The object enabler component needed to fully utilize CADVault objects on client computers is called CADVault Runtime. CADVault Runtime is available as a free download. Yes, but it is not very useful. In AutoCAD 2004 and above, users are able to encrypt drawings. Once a drawing is encrypted, the password is required in order to open it again. If an encrypted drawing is sent to a third party, the password must be sent along with the drawing file. Once an encrypted drawing is opened, it becomes a normal drawing again, with no restrictions on usage. If you don’t trust the person to whom you are sending the drawing, or you don’t know how securely they will retain control of your drawings, this is no protection at all. A secure drawing file created by CADVault retains its programmed access restrictions no matter what happens to it. Such a file is designed to be distributed beyond the originator's organization to untrusted third parties. With CADVault, your security is programmed into the file format, and it follows the file no matter where it goes. In AutoCAD 2004 and above, you can digitally sign your drawing. This usually involves purchasing a digital key, paying a company to keep this key, and running a private or Web-based key server. AutoCAD 2004 will check any signed drawing during load and in case of modifications delete the signature. Thus, this feature is useful for checking to see if a drawing has been modified, but no use in preventing such modification. CADVault not only monitors drawing modifications, it can disallow them. Also, CADVault provides a more sophisticated signature mechanism. Different parts of a drawing may be signed, and multiple digital signatures may be applied. Nothing. It is exactly the same software, and it therefore provides a very sound basis for evaluation. What you try out is what you are going to get. The only difference is that until CADVault is licensed, it cannot create truly secure vault objects. They look and act just like secure vault objects, but they can in fact be opened by anyone quite easily. Before CADVault for AutoCAD can create truly secure CADVault objects, the software must be authorized by installing a software license certificate issued by CADLock, Inc. The software license certificate can be obtained via the internet by providing a license request that includes your software product code and the name of the license owner. The authorization wizard starts automatically when CADVault is started, or it can be started manually at any time while AutoCAD is running by using the CADVaultAuthorize command. You can authorize your CADVault software in a variety of different ways, depending on your circumstances: You buy a single user license on CD.The CD you receive from us will come with a product code. You install the software from CD, run the authorization wizard and fill in the product code and registration data. The authorization wizard sends a license request to our server and it is automatically signed. You save your master key to a safe place, such as a diskette or CD-R, and place it in a physically secure location. You buy a single user license without a CD.You download and install the free evaluation version of CADVault. You request a product code from us, which we email to you after payment has been received. You run the authorization wizard as described above. You don't have a live internet connection on the workstation where CADVault is installed.Instead of submitting your license signing request automatically from within the authorization wizard, you can save it to a file and send this file to us by email, fax or mail. This procedure also generates a master key as before. We sign the request and return the signed request by email, fax or mail. The next time you open CADVault, you can import this signed request (license certificate) using the authorization wizard. This is easiest if you receive the license certificate by email and can get a copy of that email to the workstation in question. The email contains both a text-based version of the license certificate which you can copy and paste into the authorization wizard's text field and a binary *.lic file which you can import using the authorization wizard. You have two users on the same workstation sharing the same master key.You will want both users to have the same master key if you want all vaults from your company to have the same master keyhole. After installation and authorization as user A, use the authorization wizard to save the license to a .lic file. Log in as user B and use the authorization wizard to import the *.lic file you just created. Files from the second user will use the same master key as files from the first user. You buy two user licenses for use on two workstations.You will want both workstations to have the same master key if you want all vaults from your company to have the same master keyhole. Install and authorize CADVault on workstation A as described above for the single user license. On workstation B, install the software and run the authorization wizard, but import the master key from the diskette or CD-R you created on workstation A. Enter the second product code and request the second license to be signed too. You have a site license.Install and authorize the software on one workstation as described above for the single user license. Save the CADVault license to a second diskette or CD-R. Install CADVault at every other workstation and simply import the license from the diskette or CD-R. This should not be a problem. Every vault object automatically contains a Master role. The Master role allows you to regain ownership permissions to a vault if the Creator key is lost or unavailable. If you follow our installation instructions, you will have the master key stored in a secure location, and you can use the private key component of this to enable the Master role and regain access to any vaults that have been created. On the face of it, no. But in practice, yes. After installation, you are required to obtain a license from CADLock, Inc. Once this is done, there is nothing to stop the license information file being exported and used on another computer. When imported by a copy of the freely downloadable CADVault software, this will provide a fully working copy of CADVault. This would appear to be an open invitation to piracy, but it is not. Read on. In addition to the moral and legal reasons, there are practical issues that make it pointless to use a stolen license. Anybody using a stolen CADVault license is at risk in two ways. First, they are making their drawings vulnerable to complete access and control by others, negating the whole point of using CADVault. Second, they are at significant risk of discovery. How does that work? Your license information file contains the public key component of your master key. This means that all seats using that license information file will create vaults that can be opened with the master key for that license. So, let's say that you email this license file to your friend across town and he installs it on his CADVault. Your friend will now begin creating vaults for which you have the master key. Your friend's vaults are now completely at your mercy. Furthermore, your friend's vaults can be linked to your license. Every vault he creates will be indelibly stamped with your information. Therefore, it is unlikely that you will want to share your license file or that your friend will want to receive it. In addition to the moral and legal reasons, a CADLock site license is available quite cheaply. It is also quite easy for us to find out about it. Like all computer security products, it is important to keep CADVault up to date. For this reason, CADVault regularly performs an automatic check to see if there are any updates available. Every CADVault installation has a unique machine key, which is generated during installation. This machine key, along with the license key is transferred to our server during update check. We will not use this information to invade your privacy, but we may use it to protect our own rights. If you use running object snaps in an AutoCAD command and hover over a vault object that contains many entities, you may experience a delay as AutoCAD analyzes the vault to determine if there are any object snap points to lock onto. A vault is a single drawing object, and the more complex a single drawing object becomes and the more object snap points it has, the more time AutoCAD needs to process it. If you have object snaps on all the time, this can result in the cursor becoming 'sticky' when hovering over a vault. There are several strategies you can use to combat this issue: - Disable measurement/grip points when creating the vault, which also disables object snaps. You may wish to do this anyway if you don't want the recipient to be able to exactly snap to points in your vault.
- Leave measurement enabled, but disable 'Resurrect' so that the vault entities remain static and not "live" entities.
- Create two roles, one for measurements (slow) and one for all other tasks (fast).
- Do not create a single vault from all your drawing, but instead create several vaults. This separation could be by geometric region (e.g. put each mechanical part or each building segment into a vault on its own). Or it may be better to separate the vaults by logical functions. If you have a floor plan, for instance, you may want the recipient to only snap to the walls, but not to all other object such as furniture or details. So create one vault with the snapable objects and another with the remaining objects. AutoCAD will then only need to process the snap points on the walls, which will be much faster.
Recipients cannot "explode" a secured vault object. What they can explode is the CADVault graphics as shown on their screen. When securing objects with CADVault for AutoCAD, you have a choice on which "proxy graphics" should be stored with your drawing. Proxy graphics is what AutoCAD displays when it does not know anythng about an object it encounters in a drawing file. The CADVault Wizard allows you to select proxy graphics as to show the vault's name, a Secure-Objects logo, the actual graphics as shown on screen, and no graphics at all. As a courtesy to recipients people often choose "Actual" graphics as proxy graphics. Then any AutoCAD, foreign CAD system or viewer is able to show an image of the secured objects even when the underlying system has no idea about vaults. While this may be a courtesy to recipients, but it also introduces a security risk. Both newer versions of AutoCAD and foreign CAD systems are able to explode proxy graphics into their graphics primitives such as lines and arcs. This means you can explode the graphics and get a series of lines without any logic behind it, but at least you can explode it. This means that vaults using proxy graphics are no more secure than, say, DWF or PDF files. To avoid this, do not use "Actual" as proxy graphics, but use something else, e.g. Logo or Name. To explode a secured CADVault into its original objects with all logic intact, the recipient needs to get Owner rights to the CADVault. Normally only the originator (you) and the Master (the supervisor who installed the software) are able to get Owner rights. However, with vaults created using the Evaluation version of CADVault for AutoCAD, everyone can get Owner rights to secured objects simply by using the unprotected Master role. This is why the Evaluation version is free: the vaults created by it are not secure! As soon as you authorize the Evaluation version to become a commercial version, the Master role becomes protected by a password only you (or the supervisor) knows. Then of course nobody else can open the Master role and thus nobody else can get Owner rights to your vaults. Contact your local reseller or try the CADLock Discussion Groups as described on the Support page. If you still have a question, email us and we'll do our best to help. | 
