A Policy-Driven License Manager for Controlling Access to Arbitrary Applications

Seeking to fill a gap in licensed software access control solutions, a license management solution based on administrator-controllable policies is presented. This solution, Lisense, is a client-server style license manager and access control solution that can be applied to any application binary without the need to alter source code or recompile the application. While Lisense provides several builtin policies like seat counting and controlling number of concurrent users running a wrapped application simultaneously, it also allows definition of new, external policies via a simple Python API, providing a high level of flexibility to the administrator in designing and developing access control systems beyond those already available. In this paper, we place Lisense in context of other access control solutions available, discuss its implementation, show an example deployment, and utilize the API to write a custom policy.