How are software license keys generated?

Check tis article on Partial Key Verification which covers the following requirements:

• License keys must be easy enough to type in.

• We must be able to blacklist (revoke) a license key in the case of chargebacks or purchases with stolen credit cards.

• No “phoning home” to test keys. Although this practice is becoming more and more prevalent, I still do not appreciate it as a user, so will not ask my users to put up with it.

• It should not be possible for a cracker to disassemble our released application and produce a working “keygen” from it. This means that our application will not fully test a key for verification. Only some of the key is to be tested. Further, each release of the application should test a different portion of the key, so that a phony key based on an earlier release will not work on a later release of our software.

• Important: it should not be possible for a legitimate user to accidentally type in an invalid key that will appear to work but fail on a future version due to a typographical error.

When I originally wrote this answer it was under an assumption that the question was regarding 'offline' validation of licence keys. Most of the other answers address online verification, which is significantly easier to handle (most of the logic can be done server side).

With offline verification the most difficult thing is ensuring that you can generate a huge number of unique licence keys, and still maintain a strong algorithm that isnt easily compromised (such as a simple check digit)

I'm not very well versed in mathematics, but it struck me that one way to do this is to use a mathematical function that plots a graph

The plotted line can have (if you use a fine enough frequency) thousands of unique points, so you can generate keys by picking random points on that graph and encoding the values in some way

As an example, we'll plot this graph, pick four points and encode into a string as "0,-500;100,-300;200,-100;100,600"

We'll encrypt the string with a known and fixed key (horribly weak, but it serves a purpose), then convert the resulting bytes through Base32 to generate the final key

The application can then reverse this process (base32 to real number, decrypt, decode the points) and then check each of those points is on our secret graph.

Its a fairly small amount of code which would allow for a huge number of unique and valid keys to be generated

It is however very much security by obscurity. Anyone taking the time to disassemble the code would be able to find the graphing function and encryption keys, then mock up a key generator, but its probably quite useful for slowing down casual piracy.

For old-school CD keys, it was just a matter of making up an algorithm for which CD keys (which could be any string) are easy to generate and easy to verify, but the ratio of valid-CD-keys to invalid-CD-keys is so small that randomly guessing CD keys is unlikely to get you a valid one.

INCORRECT WAY TO DO IT:

Starcraft and Half-life both used the same checksum, where the 13th digit verified the first 12. Thus, you could enter anything for the first 12 digits, and guess the 13th (there's only 10 possibilities), leading to the infamous 1234-56789-1234

The algorithm for verifying is public, and looks something like this:

x = 3;
for(int i = 0; i < 12; i++)
{
    x += (2 * x) ^ digit[i];
}
lastDigit = x % 10;

CORRECT WAY TO DO IT

Windows XP takes quite a bit of information, encrypts it, and puts the letter/number encoding on a sticker. This allowed MS to both verify your key and obtain the product-type (Home, Professional, etc.) at the same time. Additionally, it requires online activation.
The full algorithm is rather complex, but outlined nicely in this (completely legal!) paper, published in Germany.

Of course, no matter what you do, unless you are offering an online service (like World of Warcraft), any type of copy protection is just a stall: unfortunately, if it's any game worth value, someone will break (or at least circumvent) the CD-key algorithm, and all other copyright protections.

REAL CORRECT WAY TO DO IT:

For online-services, life is a bit simpler, since even with the binary file you need to authenticate with their servers to make any use of it (eg. have a WoW account). The CD-key algorithm for World of Warcraft - used, for instance, when buying playtime cards - probably looks something like this:

1. Generate a very large cryptographically-secure random number.
2. Store it in our database and print it on the card.
   
   Then, when someone enters a playtime-card number, check if it's in the database, and if it is, associate that number with the current user so it can never be used again.

For online services, there is no reason not to use the above scheme; using anything else can lead to problems.