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111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

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Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#51
post #16

So my last name is Key, and my initials are C D, so in the mid-late 90s any time I was prompted to enter a CD Key I would always try “yes”. It worked at least half a dozen times.

Thanks for that, it brought me back to my teens.

In the Renegade BBS system, for like one minor version or so, you could authenticate to any account, including SysOp, by hitting Enter instead of providing a password. Of course, in Renegade and many BBSes, you could login with either your account name or ID, which was an auto-incrementing (the manual way) integer starting at "0", the Sysop. And I'm fairly certain that the problem wasn't triggered unless you logged in by ID, which few ever did.

On one Saturday nearly every BBS in my area code running that software was restoring from backup.

I stumbled upon it because I was "1" on another BBS[0] and accidentally popped "Enter" aiming for Shift when typing my password. After picking my jaw up from the table I called my buddy and told him to unplug the phone line. :)

[0] Actually, I had hacked up and substantially re-written from the leaked Telegard 2.5 source (whichever was the origin of Renegade's code) and the password validation code was insanity -- I was young enough to see hacking as mystical and suspected I'd found a cleverly hidden back-door so I rewrote the entire thing to be as "dumb as the rest of the password handling logic was"; I had heard, later, that there was something funny going on but I stopped playing with that code by then and the Internet quickly ended that world. In all likelihood, the original developers were doing something novel that I was totally unfamiliar with and I made it worse, but I like to think I "locked that up". :)

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That didn't stop people creating hard-to-crack copy-protected software. Since disk drives existed, games makers created floppy disks that industrial disk duplicators that standard computers could read, but couldn't write, and ensured their games had code to check for that. It generally wasn't feasible to replicate these special tracks with a normal floppy drive, so instead people had to reverse engineer the game and…

I remember a text adventure game on Amstrad CPC ("Le passager du temps" in french, roughly translating as "Time passenger") which I had a pirated copy. You could play the adventure until you found the time travel machine (could take 1 to 3 hours depending). You start the machine and then it went on infinite loop text : "tired of piracy tired of piracy tired of piracy..." ! Highly frustrating, but you couldn't help to…

Could also be something like that:

https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-cleveres...

I remember reading some article I can't find again about a very unusual floppy protection that involved nonstandard floppy format, something like non standard sector sizes that could be read by the hardware but not written, and the protected software implemented some direct access to the floppy hardware to read data.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#54
post #8

It may sound strange to people who were born later. But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. Software was cracked the moment it came out and it was assumed people bought any software because they feared legal action rather than because they had no other way to get their hands on it -- lat…

I really really miss the 90s computing environment. I was young but it was a total wild west and the internet was beautiful and totally open. For a curious kid without a lot of friends it was amazing.

That really was me in the 90s. Made all my real and best friends using mIRC and ICQ. the good old days.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#55
post #3

Interesting! I once lost my original StarCraft CD Key. In a desperate attempt to simply install and play the game I tried converting “StarCraft” to numbers using A1Z26 cipher. Honesty didn’t know it at the time what to call what I was doing. I was just a kid! But, guess what? It worked! It only worked for local play. BattleNet did not see it as a valid key. I like to think some SWE somewhere hid that in there on purp…

My brother bought CorelDRAW for Win95 and only kept the CD, forgetting how important the paper with the key was. On a reinstall he than entered 11223344556677889900 and it worked. I used that method multiple times as a teen on software from different manufacturers. It worked quite often. Though sometimes you had to play with the numbers at the end. (sometimes 000 other times 011 etc.)

wtf. he entered that number just out of nowhere and it worked? what a wizard!

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#56
post #50
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The activation process relies on public key cryptography. The private keys, held by Microsoft, are amongst their most well-protected assets. Much more so than their source code, for instance, which is developed with the expectation that it will be leaked in part or in whole.

Given the length of Windows serial keys is not that long, why couldn't one extract the check function and run an iteration attack to generate valid keys? Edit: @ale42: makes sense, thanks for putting this one to rest. 36^25 is approximately 8 x 10^38 which is a really, really big number.

There are 25 characters, each of which has 36 possible values. So 36^25 possibilities, and log2(36^25) = 129.2. There are basically 129 bits of entropy in there, so good luck bruteforcing it.

This makes me think of a shareware app (I think an icon editor) for Windows 3.1 back in 1994 or so... I could find a valid registration key by entering random numbers by hand in around 2 minutes. And I wasn't lucky as I tried and succeeded several times ;-) But the rule (figured out after I had 10 or so valid keys) was simple maths with the digits, no crypto behind.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#57
post #8

It may sound strange to people who were born later. But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. Software was cracked the moment it came out and it was assumed people bought any software because they feared legal action rather than because they had no other way to get their hands on it -- lat…

Very true, there are a lot of sites out there back in the day that a lot of oldtimers would remember. My personal favourite was astalavista, named in relation to the legit search-site altavista I guess. Actually I take that back, my favourite site was +fravia's reverse engineering pages. Mostly because the legitimate crack-sites were safe, but there was always a risk of downloading something with a virus, or a trojan…

Wow astalavista brings back some great memories. Hadn't thought about that site for a long, long time.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#58
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also a valid key pre-brood war that was something like “1234567890123”

Brood war didn't have its own keys. Both 1234567890123 and 3333333333333 worked for StarCraft.

All 'G' was valid for Quake 3. I was surprised to find this out from my friend's 11 year old little sibling.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#59
post #39
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password This persisted for longer than it should have on Windows! I remember on Windows XP Home Edition, you could just press Ctrl Alt Delete to drop to the classic winlogon.exe screen and then log in as "Administrator" with no password! By that time, though, Microsoft had implemented product activation. To my knowledge, no one ever cracked the telephone activation…

Devils0wn Windows XP Final serial key, yeah baby! Seared into my mind forever after entering it so much: FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXKRT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 I used to reinstall windows anytime anything got weird, which was often because I was always messing with disabling combinations of system services in attempts to reduce OS memory consumption. Wtf is svchost.exe doing? I don't want it! Wireless Zero Config? I don't have Wi-Fi, too fla…

Oh...my...god...

That CD key. I remember that one as well. Good times :) Thanks for bringing up these memories.

Re: 111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

#60
post #50
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The activation process relies on public key cryptography. The private keys, held by Microsoft, are amongst their most well-protected assets. Much more so than their source code, for instance, which is developed with the expectation that it will be leaked in part or in whole.

Given the length of Windows serial keys is not that long, why couldn't one extract the check function and run an iteration attack to generate valid keys? Edit: @ale42: makes sense, thanks for putting this one to rest. 36^25 is approximately 8 x 10^38 which is a really, really big number.

Not if their cryptography is done properly. Cryptosystems are designed to maintain their security even if the complete algorithm is known to the adversary. You'll commonly see this phrased as "don't rely on security through obscurity".
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