LMM: A common component for software license management on cloud

On a cloud environment, the platform that runs a program is not fixed, and there is a possibility that a program runs on several servers in a cloud environment. Transferability of the license information by a valid user should be allowed, even though general requirements for license management have to be satisfied. In this paper, we consider software license management models for cloud environments, and discuss security functions for building secure license management schemes. We show four license management models and analyze the security requirements for the models. Then, we design a common component referred to as the license management module (LMM), and explain the security functions required for the LMM. Furthermore, we discuss how to realize the security functions and evaluate their performance using a prototype implementation.