Virtualized Environments

Stop license abuse on VMs

Stop revenue leakage from casual and intentional license abuse when VMs are duplicated with your software installed.

Turn this into the additional license sales required.

Virtualized environments are everywhere—whether it's full VMs, Docker containers, or individual desktops. Many desktops running Windows 11+, for example, present themselves as being virtualized and are indeed virtualized environments under the hood.

We wanted to build excellent support for virtualized image detection and cloning protection to ensure you get properly paid for every license seat you sell to customers.

We accomplish this using a technique called the nonce—think of it as a transient secret. Every time the application communicates with the Zentitle Cloud during license refresh, we generate a new nonce from the search server registered to that individual instance. When that instance stores the nonce and makes a subsequent request, it must provide that same nonce. We validate this nonce to authenticate using that license seat, then generate a new nonce to send back to the client.

If a process receives its nonce and clones itself, Process One and Process Two will have the same secret. The first process to make a refresh request will have its seat validated by the Zentitle Cloud and receive a new nonce.

However, the other process will no longer know the current nonce, so its request will be denied when it attempts a refresh. When this happens, that process realizes it has lost its seat to a clone.

At this point, the application can decide whether to try checking out another seat against the license—it's up to you as the vendor to define what policy to enforce when we detect that a clone has claimed that seat.

See more in the Virtual Machine Control topic.