Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?
Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
11–20 of 230 posts
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
The obscured part was pretending the unlocker needs external information
I guess they could have done a public/private key pair in 1996, but doing that over a phone call was going to be painful. A simple password read over the phone and verified by the software was the best solution at the time. Mind, this was also intended for a world where internet connectivity was not to be expected. The majority of PC owners were not online.
Which is true, so the distribution of the software cracker would have been fairly limited I would have thought.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
The obscured part was pretending the unlocker needs external information
I guess they could have done a public/private key pair in 1996, but doing that over a phone call was going to be painful. A simple password read over the phone and verified by the software was the best solution at the time. Mind, this was also intended for a world where internet connectivity was not to be expected. The majority of PC owners were not online.
How would your scheme work? You use RSA to encrypt the entire thing? Or you use it to get a key for a block cipher and then use that?
I feel like either way, you'd need the key to be different for every CD, otherwise you could just share the shared key. But if the encryption of every CD is different, why not just share the block cipher key directly? They can have a list of CDs and the associated key(s).
What additional security or functionality does an RSA like step add here?
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#14Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?
Maybe have n versions of the CD (maybe 16, or 32), so there are n decryption keys. When the buyer recites the code over the phone, the program run by the salesperson can identify which key is used based on the number.
The hacker groups would be a little frustrated trying to find all of the different CDs.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#15Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?
You would need some sort of hardware serial number system for PCs and a whole security infrastructure to verify that the serial number being used for the unlock wasn't faked. Then you could do per-PC unlocks. I'm not aware of anything like that being widespread back in the Quake days, though these days every computing device you own probably has a unique ID burned into ROM somewhere.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#16I did exactly this thing when I was a broke teenager. The files in my ID1 directory that I shuffle around from computer to computer to this day came from that disc 30 years ago. (I still have the disc, but not the case.) I did, however, purchase Quake II and III when they were released. And many years later bought Quake on Steam. I think they got their money's worth from me after all.
(There were some who believed that making the shareware disc easily-crackable was an intentional stroke of genius. It got people who couldn't afford the full retail version to buy the game and expand its popularity. The argument being that $10 was a fairly ludicrous amount of money to pay for a single shareware game. Shareware CDs tended to be $5 on the high end, or free with most computer/gaming magazines.)
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#17It’s worth getting the Quake shareware disc for the NIN soundtrack. Official track names are now available following the vinyl release a few years ago. This is the only CD release of the soundtrack. Just don’t forget to skip track 1.
The data track never sounds very good. A little too industrial for my tastes.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#18Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?
Some sort of public key crypto scheme + including hard-to-change local device characteristics in the challenge.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#19This screw up ended up costing id Software millions in sales. With the Doom franchise they only included the first episode in the shareware version. But to save a buck I guess they decided this was better than mailing a second CD with the full game on it. Then doubling down on that greed by putting their entire game library on the disc. This is right about the time John Romero and John Carmack parted ways, can't help but wonder if this debacle played a role. And by all accounts Quake's development was painful, so imagine this happens after going through hell getting a game out the door.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#20[comment withdrawn]