VMWare image protection

Question

we have an application that is packaged as a Linux VMWare image. Now we have to find a way to protect it against illegal duplication and installation. We have studied several USB dongle-based solutions, but all of them require modifications of the application at the source code level (simple instrumentation is restricted to Windows EXEs). Is there a way to protect a VMWare image from running, and to perform periodic checks?

EDIT: this application is part of a professional solution and not distributed as is. The VMWare packaging is for virtualization purpose, not for distribution. We sell complete solutions for telcos including hardware and support, in the $10k-1M price ranges. However, since the clients have access to the platforms, we have to make sure that they just can't take the images and run them elsewhere or defeat the licensing policy. So the remarks below questioning the need for protection, although perfectly valid in the general case, don't apply there.

Answer 1

I know this is said every time, but it is worth repeating:

Please just don't. Sell your software at a price point that represents its worth, with a basic key-scheme if you must to keep honest people honest, and leave it at that. The pirates will always steal it, and a hardware dongle will just cause grief for your honest customers.

Besides, any scheme you build in will just be defeated by reverse engineering; if you make it a pain to use your software, you will motivate otherwise honest people to defeat it, or to search the internet for a crack. Simply make the protection less painful than searching for a crack.

Software Monkey, Jan 2009