Vista - Securely licensing products for use with VPC

We are a software company that has a number of customers that use our
products on VPC VMs. Our problem is that our licensing scheme relies on
uniquely identifying the machine that it is run on, and this scheme is
failing to see each VM as unique. Can you please provide us with some
guidance on a recommended method for detecting unique VM instances or a
methodology for securely licensing products for use with VPC.

On Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:36:02 -0700, Eddie Cole
<EddieCole@xxxxxx> wrote:
I think this will be very difficult, indeed...
Ideally a VM will have its own unique MAC address, SID etc just like a
real PC, but it is very simple to work around this by just making a
file copy of both the vmc and vhd file on the host to another loaction
to create an absolute identical (cloned) virtual machine. These will
have the same "everything" and cannot be separated.

In situations like yours, probably your best bet is to disallow your
app from running in a virtual environment. You can detect the fact
that the software is running in a virtual machine even though it is
not trivial. There are threads on this topic you can search for.
For example the name of the BIOS will be one item that can be used.

I have several applications from other makers that do not run in a VPC
guest because they detect the fact at startup and refuse.

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)