Software licence protection and management for organisations

Abstract

Most organisations have recently converted their physical assets into digital forms. This underlines the needs to have different types of software products to manage such information, and raises security concerns for protecting software products from being illegally used in organisations. This paper proposes a licence management solution that protects software products from being illegally used. The proposed scheme is based on dividing an organisation devices into dynamic domains, each of which is bound to a single software product. Each dynamic domain has a predefined number of devices that can use the dynamic domain-specific software product. This number is specified by the software provider and is stored in the software licence file. In this case a software product can be installed on multiple devices, and a device can possess multiple software products by joining multiple dynamic domains. The proposed mechanism ensures that the number of used copies of software product does not exceed the limit that is agreed with the software provider. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.