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Software Licensing Protection for VMs Gets a Boost

By Tara Seals, TMCnet Contributor

The promise of cloud computing is summed up by the term “efficiency”—by hosting software in a data center on virtual machines (VMs) rather than on proprietary platforms on-premise, enterprises can reap the benefits of server consolidation, increased utilization, better redundancy and faster recovery times after failure.

There’s a downside for software vendors though; a virtual environment opens the door to the ability to clone software images, including traditional software licenses. Most licensing and copy protection software detects illegal duplication by looking at various machine data such as drive serial number, motherboard serial number and so on. But when a VM is duplicated, none of this information changes. That renders the hardware locking of most licensing software useless, and exposes software vendors to potential lost revenues.

“Usage of virtual machines has grown exponentially in recent years, and copying a VM is now as easy as copying a file,” explained CrypKey, which has released CrypKey 8.x with VM Protect to solve the issue. “Unauthorized software duplication has never been easier.”

VMProtect, true to its name, is meant to protect software applications from illegal copying by Virtual Machine (VM) duplication. CrypKey version 8 locks the software license to the underlying hardware even when in a VM environment, ensuring the software vendor’s license is still locked to only one PC or server.

It gets machine specific information not just from the computer the software is on – if it’s on a VM, it gets machine-specific information from the host machine. If the entire VM is copied to a different computer, VMProtect detects this and illegal usage of the software can be prevented.

"This is something our customers have been asking for,” said Jim McCartney, CEO of CrypKey and chief architect of this new feature. “The fact that we were able to integrate it into our standard license locking is a real bonus. This way our customers don’t need to maintain different versions of their software.”

To take advantage of VMProtect, CrypKey customers can get CrypKey SDK or Instant V8 or later. The technology is also automatically and invisibly deployed as part of CrypKey’s proprietary CrypKey Intelligent Hardware Sensing (CIHS) technology.