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Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

dmitrybrant.com

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Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

#211

Post by prmoustache »

Sophira wrote: post #75

The fact that the software and hardware is evidently still in use at some companies gives me pause about whether releasing it in a cracked form publicly after having published it on a personal website would be a good idea. Software companies love to milk enterprises for all their worth, because they're the entities who will pay the most amount of money if it means that the software they use can still work - and a big…

> If you haven't already checked whether the patent and other intellectual property is still owned by any company,

The copyright may still apply but any patent must have expired (20years).

Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

#212

Post by wildzzz »

throw101010 wrote: post #37
nsoonhui wrote: post #27

I write civil engineering software [0] and am familiar with this kind of dongle. Yes, even today there are users who want this kind of dongle instead of, say, cloud-based validation. They feel secure only if they have something tangible in hand. Since we sold (and still sell) perpetual licenses, it becomes a problem when a dongle breaks and replacement parts are no longer available. Not all users want to upgrade. Als…

> Yes, even today there are users who want this kind of dongle instead of, say, cloud-based validation. They feel secure only if they have something tangible in hand. In my experience this continues to this day due to people who require drawing on air-gapped computers, because the drawings/simulations they work on are highly sensitive (nuclear, military, and other sensitive infrastructure). But I'm sure there are als…

Hardware dongles are incredibly rare now. Even on airgapped machines, you'll see a local Flex license server running. This is especially true when you have a small network of multiple machines that may require the use of a network license. Dongles are just too delicate, they get lost or break. Or you end up with overzealous security software that decides to block anything that isn't a mouse or keyboard. There are plenty of modern day solutions for a transferable license.

Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

#213

Post by numpad0 »

samplatt wrote: post #83
b1temy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You might think cracking dongles is fun and copy protection is evil, but without protection, our livelihood is affected. I understand you might feel this way, but it seems to me customers are mostly business clients, who would are more inclined to spare the expense of purchasing said licenses, since they're not personally buying it themselves, and would want to have support and liability (i.e: Someone to hold liabl…

>business clients, who would are more inclined to spare the expense of purchasing said licenses, since they're not personally buying it themselves, and would want to have support and liability (i.e: Someone to hold liable for problems in said software.) This is a nice idea but the reality is that there's MANY corporate customers who are happy to get away with casual piracy. Sometimes it's a holdover from when the com…

Yeah, there is a reason why Adobe, Autodesk, Oracle, IBM, etc., are notorious for weirdly draconian and idiotic-sounding licensing enforcement. Many corporate managers show very little sympathy to the concept of IP laws if they did understand superiority of laws over convenience in the first place.

Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

#214

Post by Ntrails »

markh1967 wrote: post #137
ruleryak wrote: post #7

Many a crack back in the day was even more simple still, we'd just find and alter the right JE or JNE into a JMP and we're off to the races. As the author found, the tough part is just finding and interpreting where and how the protection was implemented. If throwing the exe in a hex editor gave you access to String Data References (not always the case, but more common than not) then you'd just fail the check you wer…

Many years ago I was a technician supporting a few custom programs on thousands of PCs. The developer of one of these programs had added a date check to his code so the program would refuse to run after a set date and each new release would increase this date by a few months so it would stop working after a few weeks if he ever stopped creating new releases. His contract ended and a few weeks later his software, now…

Mostly non-malicious example... My employer asked me to write a UI to solve a problem for a handful of people until a proper (giant ever-delayed) migration was finished. Over a couple of weeks I made it work despite not having dealt with MVVM/XAML/Whatever before and I was pretty pleased with the outcome. But it was a hacked together thing! I'm not a real dev and given that I got a promise it wouldn't get distributed.

So, you know, in the program.cs startup I checked the username vs a hardcoded list of people in the relevant teams, and if it wasn't crashed out with an error and a support email address.

About 18 months after I had moved on, I got an email with a screenshot of that error message. it would appear the Milan (something like that) office had got their hands on a copy but it just wouldn't work for them...

Trivial to undo of course, but I did enjoy the throwback!

Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

#215

Post by electroly »

IshKebab wrote: post #135
Plasmoid wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even at a simple level, if it's between spending weeks going through purchasing or not asking too many questions and getting on with it. I can see a lot of people choosing option B.

Yeah case in point - how many people actually pay for Visual Studio? You're supposed to if you're using it for commercial purposes but I don't think I've ever seen a commercial license used (though I don't do a lot of Windows work tbf).

In the late 90s/early 00s, I worked at a company that bought a single license of Visual Studio + MSDN and shared it with every single employee. In those days, MSDN shipped binders full of CDs with every Microsoft product, and we had 56k modems; it was hard to pirate. I don't think that company ever seriously considered buying a license for each person. There was no copy protection so they just went nuts. That MSDN copy of Windows NT Server 4 went on our server, too.

This was true of all software they used, but MSDN was the most expensive and blatant. If it didn't have copy protection, they weren't buying more than one copy.

We were a software company. Our own software shipped with a Sentinel SuperPro protection dongle. I guess they assumed their customers were just as unscrupulous as them. Probably right.

Every employer I've worked for since then has actually purchased the proper licenses. Is it because the industry started using online activation and it wasn't so easy to copy any more? I've got a sneaky feeling.

Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

#216

Post by bradley13 »

b1temy wrote: post #81
nsoonhui wrote: post #27

I write civil engineering software [0] and am familiar with this kind of dongle. Yes, even today there are users who want this kind of dongle instead of, say, cloud-based validation. They feel secure only if they have something tangible in hand. Since we sold (and still sell) perpetual licenses, it becomes a problem when a dongle breaks and replacement parts are no longer available. Not all users want to upgrade. Als…

> You might think cracking dongles is fun and copy protection is evil, but without protection, our livelihood is affected. I understand you might feel this way, but it seems to me customers are mostly business clients, who would are more inclined to spare the expense of purchasing said licenses, since they're not personally buying it themselves, and would want to have support and liability (i.e: Someone to hold liabl…

The honestly of clients, even businesses, is...questionable. I have an acquaintance who sells a very expensive software suite that is absolutely needed in a particular industry. Price for a perpetual license is 6 digits.

The big boys in the industry won't risk problems, and anyway, that's a small price for them. However, the many smaller companies? They may absolutely need the software, but that's a substantial price for them. If they can get a cracked version online, they do.

And the cracked versions? They are made by companies out of legal reach: Russia, Belarus, Pakistan, India. They crack the software, and either put it online for free, or even have the cheek to sell it for a reduced price.

I've told my friend/acquaintance that he really needs to put the software in the cloud, accessible only via browser. However, this would be a massive undertaking, so he hasn't done it (yet).

Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

#217

Post by andyjohnson0 »

electroly wrote: post #215
IshKebab wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah case in point - how many people actually pay for Visual Studio? You're supposed to if you're using it for commercial purposes but I don't think I've ever seen a commercial license used (though I don't do a lot of Windows work tbf).

In the late 90s/early 00s, I worked at a company that bought a single license of Visual Studio + MSDN and shared it with every single employee. In those days, MSDN shipped binders full of CDs with every Microsoft product, and we had 56k modems; it was hard to pirate. I don't think that company ever seriously considered buying a license for each person. There was no copy protection so they just went nuts. That MSDN co…

> In the late 90s/early 00s, I worked at a company that bought a single license of Visual Studio + MSDN and shared it with every single employee.

During roughly the same time period I worked for a company with similar practices. When a director realised what was going on, and the implications for personal liability, I was given the job of physically securing the MSDN CD binder, and tracking installations.

This resulted in everyone hating me, to the extent of my having stand-up, public arguments with people who felt they absolutely needed Visual J++, or whatever. Eventually I told the business that I wasn't prepared to be their gatekeeper anymore. I suspect practices lapsed back to what they'd been before, but its been a while.

Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

#218

Post by andyjohnson0 »

> For some reason, Reko was not able to decompile this code into a C representation, but it still produced a disassembly, which will work just fine for our purposes.

Perhaps an indication that the code in that segment was hand-written in assembly language rather than C?

Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

#219

Post by wat10000 »

markh1967 wrote: post #137
ruleryak wrote: post #7

Many a crack back in the day was even more simple still, we'd just find and alter the right JE or JNE into a JMP and we're off to the races. As the author found, the tough part is just finding and interpreting where and how the protection was implemented. If throwing the exe in a hex editor gave you access to String Data References (not always the case, but more common than not) then you'd just fail the check you wer…

Many years ago I was a technician supporting a few custom programs on thousands of PCs. The developer of one of these programs had added a date check to his code so the program would refuse to run after a set date and each new release would increase this date by a few months so it would stop working after a few weeks if he ever stopped creating new releases. His contract ended and a few weeks later his software, now…

That's a dangerous fix. What if someone tries to run your new version in the past?

Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

#220

Post by jandrese »

jofla_net wrote: post #79
jandrese wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem is that they often couldn't be daisy chained, the connector on the back was only useful for an actual printer. So if everybody started doing it you would have to swap them constantly which is a headache. So they're mostly used for software where it's going to be the only thing running on the box. I find it interesting that they didn't make it into the USB era where you could easily have something that doe…

I could have sworn, back in my day, on WinNT4 we successfully chained a red and white pair from Autodesk. One for AutoCad, and either Mechanical Desktop or 3ds Max.

It worked sometimes, but was always a roll of the dice.
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