A dongle is a small hardware device that connects to a computer to authenticate a piece of software. When the dongle is not present, the software runs in a restricted mode or refuses to run. Dongles are used by some proprietary vendors as a form of copy prevention or digital rights management because it is much harder to copy the dongle than to copy the software it authenticates. Vendors of software protection dongles (and dongle-controlled software) often use terms such as hardware key, hardware token, or security device in their written literature. In day-to-day use however, the jargon word "dongle" is much more commonly used.

يعني أن الدنجل dongle و قد يأخذ أحد الأشكال الموضحة في الصورة هو بكل بساطة مفتاح إلكتروني عبارة عن ذاكرة PROM مع بعض الدارات الأخرى التي تساعدها في الإتصال مع الحاسوب ( و هذا ما قد تشاهده إذا ... فتحت الدنجل ). و يتم إدخال الدنجل في المدخل المتوازي أو USB .