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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

#221

Post by ForHackernews »

Searching for RPG compilers, I found this IBM notice: https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/osvs-rpg-ii-compiler110-wi...

    General Availability
        02-Nov-1981 , 281-999 
    No longer available for order, Withdrawn from Market
        05-Dec-2022 , 922-053 
    Transition to Extended/Sustained or End of Support
        30-Sep-2023 , 922-078 
    Completion of Extended, Sustained, Extension availability
        30-Sep-2023
1981 to 2023 is a staggering run of support. That's why firms still buy IBM.

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

#222

Post by superxpro12 »

wat10000 wrote: post #219
markh1967 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

the spacetime paradox is the bigger concern imo. nothing to worry about.

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

#224

Post by zzzeek »

dunham wrote: post #20

Back when I was a kid in the 80's. I cracked one of the Ultima games. I had it on my hard drive and didn't want to stick a floppy in every time I ran it. The code decrypted itself, which confused debuggers, and then loaded a special sector from disk. It was a small sector buried in the payload of a larger sector, so the track was too big to copy with standard tools. The data in the sector was just the start address o…

my story of this is Atari Macro Assembler. The floppy had a specific sector that was damaged, and the loader would test this sector to ensure it was in fact damaged. this was obvious becuase whenever loading the floppy, you had to wait for one of those big "BZZT....BZZT" things where the 810 drive was trying to access a bad sector and giving up. I was able to disassemble maybe the first 30 bytes of the boot to see it checking this and doing the jmp. I just overwrote it with a single jmp and got not just a copy but much faster loading without the BZZTBZZT part.

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

#225

Post by self_awareness »

unnouinceput wrote: post #118
sedatk wrote: post #108

Of course it used to be simple in the earlier days. It got way better and fast with HASP and alike in the mid 90’s. I specifically remember software that kept a portion of its data in the dongle memory with good anti-debugging techniques too. But even the hardest protection would take a week to break at most.

Tell that to the crackers who worked for over a year to simulate a social network in order to finally crack the game Red Dead Redemption 2, which had a very custom game protection implemented by Rockstar. Also to this day there is no crack to Diablo 3, famous for being single player but with online verification. You can create very hard to crack protections quite easy if you employ self-modifying code techniques. Do…

> The reason why this is not more common

The real reason is that executable modifying its own code is often flagged by AV, or the OS itself, as an "insecure" activity. Since self-modification is used in attacks and exploits, good protections rarely use it now. It's impossible to use codesigns with self-modified code.

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

#226

Post by jweather »

wildzzz wrote: post #212
throw101010 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ple…

In my small corner of technology (AV) I regularly use three products with physical USB license keys: Crestron VC-4, Scala Digital Signage, and Dataton Watchout. Two of them have a "virtual license key" option that costs extra, intended for use with a VM. I wish they were more rare...

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

#227

Post by felineflock »

I did something similar decades ago: ran on debug with and without the dongle, then compared the execution path to identify where exactly it deviated. Then replaced the "jump" with "nop" to prevent it from branching out when the dongle was absent. This was with an early version of Visual C++ and I knew only a little 8086 Assembly.

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

#228

Post by xxr »

weinzierl wrote: post #94

These dongles used to be ubiquitous and they broke all the time. As a young intern, I arrived early one morning to find the PCB layout software (PADS PowerPCB) on our "design PC" wasn’t working. (I use quotes because it was just the beefiest machine we had, naturally our boss’s PC, which he kindly shared) Obviously the dongle. I tried unplugging and replugging it, with and without the printer daisy-chained. Nothing.…

>they broke all the time

While I was reading the OP I kept thinking about how an accounting firm's entire ability to do business rested on the continued functioning of a parallel-port dongle. I just have to imagine that they had a box full of these.

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

#229

Post by bloomingeek »

Kind of related: I own and still use an HP laptop that came with 8 GB of DDR4 SDRAM and 16 GB of Intel Optane memory. When MS told all of us that Win 10 was moving away from support, I decided to format and install Ubuntu. I have lots of experience with Linux, so it was gonna be a piece of cake.

Wrong! To my great surprise Linux wouldn't load, even after trying three different versions of Linux. After doing a massive search on the internet, I finally found a post that said I should crack open the case and remove the Optane chip, which I did. Presto, Linux was loaded and working fine!

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

#230

Post by SamBorick »

I forwarded this to my dad who still works on RPG. This product is called "Software Sentinel":

> It required an input key that was unique to our dongle series & our own code that was whatever we wanted. The reply was a hash of both values.

> The last version we used was USB. They retired the parallel style long ago.

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