A secure and change-tolerant method for obtaining an identifier for a collection of assets associated with a computing environment. Each asset has an asset parameter and the computing environment has a fingerprint based on an original collection of assets and on a codeword generation algorithm on the original collection of assets. The method comprises: retrieving the asset parameters of the collection of assets and processing the retrieved asset parameters to obtain code symbols. An error-correction algorithm is applied to the code symbols to obtain the identifier. The method can be used in node-locking.