Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
1–10 of 89 posts
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#2This was an entertaining read and well explained.
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#3What program do those disassembly screenshots come from?
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#4That was really cool and educational, especially the part about reverse engineering the VM! Makes me wonder if all companies go to such trouble to protect their IP, especially since it seems that VM was in-house
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#5What program do those disassembly screenshots come from?
Replying just in case you get an answer, those are cool.
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#6What program do those disassembly screenshots come from?
I think it's from IDA. For example see screenshots here: https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/6_0/.
There are similar reverse engineering tools that are open source such as:
- Ghidra: https://ghidra-sre.org/
- radare2: https://rada.re/n/radare2.html
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#7This was amazing to read. Reading stories of reverse engineering and cracking long-dead programs are interesting enough, but then being able to buy the domain and re-implement the authentication servers from just what the client expects?!
I'm staggered at the skills needed to do that.
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#8This is part of a larger pattern of fairly weak attempts to confuse a reverse engineer that made it frustrating to figure out what all the opcodes did, and there were many duplicate opcodes that were just implemented in different ways.
Since the code presented in the article didn't look like handwritten Asm (and if it was, it would've probably been even more insanely obfuscated and greatly confused IDA's decompilation), I wonder if compilers of the time were far worse at optimisation, or if the author deliberately disabled it so that the code would be more bloated and harder to understand as well as containing the source obfuscations; seems like "Here's addition implemented by multiplying the result with some number and its reciprocal" would be something that's replaced-on-sight by an optimiser doing constant propagation.
Also, I was not surprised to discover that this program appears to be both [1] of German origin, and [2] shareware. When I was in the cracking scene long ago, "German shareware" was widely known for the insane strength of its protection.
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#9What a magnificent yak shave.
Re: Bringing a decade old vector editor back to life
#10What program do those disassembly screenshots come from?
From the author: "the x86 disassembly comes from IDA, the VM disassembly is literally in notepad++ and generated by my disassembler"