Ask HN: Insights into securely distributing binaries (call home)?

Say I have an application I would like to sell, for the sake of argument a war or a jar. I want to sell a license s.t. each registered user can only run on N machines simultaneously. I'm thinking of a call home where some secure sessions are negotiated and binaries can stop running if they are not authorized. I'm sure there is a lot of work on this area, can someone point me at the generally accepted techniques?