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RunAsDate – Run a program with the specified date/time (2019)

nirsoft.net

61–64 of 64 posts

Re: RunAsDate – Run a program with the specified date/time (2019)

#61
post #58

A fun fact about Windows is that you can just pluck the system time out of a known memory location (0x7ffe0014). It's unlikely that a tool like this could patch that and I wouldn't be surprised if it's one of the techniques that shareware can use to detect tampering with the system time. I wouldn't be surprised if video games used it to prevent cheating either. What did surprise me is that the Go runtime appears to u…

I'd assume one would just set a breakpoint on memory read of that location and return a different value to the application?

Re: RunAsDate – Run a program with the specified date/time (2019)

#62
post #58

A fun fact about Windows is that you can just pluck the system time out of a known memory location (0x7ffe0014). It's unlikely that a tool like this could patch that and I wouldn't be surprised if it's one of the techniques that shareware can use to detect tampering with the system time. I wouldn't be surprised if video games used it to prevent cheating either. What did surprise me is that the Go runtime appears to u…

Linux has something similar, where the gettimeofday function is commonly made available via a VDSO

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSO

Re: RunAsDate – Run a program with the specified date/time (2019)

#63
post #28

I would like to take this opportunity to note that all NirSoft tools are closed source. Its nice that "Nir" or whoever has made them freely available, but when the day comes that they are not updated anymore, because of lack of interest, or life changes or whatever, all the effort that went into making them is lost to history. No one will be able to fork the project, or continue on with the work, as the source code w…

By most measures these programs are more “free” than any gpl software.

It seems you dont know what open source means.

Re: RunAsDate – Run a program with the specified date/time (2019)

#64

Several people have asked in existing threads why you'd want this, so, let's give a very real example that we can guess probably at least one HN reader will be grateful for: At the end of next month (September 2021) the root CA certificate for DST Root CA X3 expires. When a new CA comes into existence in the Web PKI they face a significant problem, even if all the brand new shiny software trusts their excellent new C…

Caveat - timestamp servers are a thing... Having your certificate cross-signed by a timestamp server ensures that even if the root certificate expires your application can continue to run provided that a timestamp server was in fact used at the moment of signing, and thusly vetted the certificate authority at that time. This allows for windows applications signed long before their cert expired can continue to run until a new signed version is deployed. This doesn't take into account certificate revocation.

Regardless, moving the date up is a good way to test.

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