Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
dmitrybrant.com
Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
1–10 of 302 posts
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#2My father, an accountant, used to have a program like that, that used RPG and a dongle! Good times. Horrible donle.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#3> I must say, this copy protection mechanism seems a bit… simplistic? A hardware dongle that just passes back a constant number?
Seems like it was an appropriate amount of engineering. Looks like this took between an afternoon and a week with the help of an emulator and decompiler. Imagine trying to do this back then without those tools.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#4> I must say, this copy protection mechanism seems a bit… simplistic? A hardware dongle that just passes back a constant number? Seems like it was an appropriate amount of engineering. Looks like this took between an afternoon and a week with the help of an emulator and decompiler. Imagine trying to do this back then without those tools.
Yeah, my IT company bitshifts suspect files and provides the magic number.
The protection just needs suficirntly complex.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#5> I must say, this copy protection mechanism seems a bit… simplistic? A hardware dongle that just passes back a constant number? Seems like it was an appropriate amount of engineering. Looks like this took between an afternoon and a week with the help of an emulator and decompiler. Imagine trying to do this back then without those tools.
Iremember doing exactly this kind of hack for a small telco in Bueno Aires. Extel. Around the year 2000.
In most cases it was not much more difficult than what OP described.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#6> I must say, this copy protection mechanism seems a bit… simplistic? A hardware dongle that just passes back a constant number? Seems like it was an appropriate amount of engineering. Looks like this took between an afternoon and a week with the help of an emulator and decompiler. Imagine trying to do this back then without those tools.
Audience matters. Something intended to stop legitimate business consumers in a non tech industry requires substantially less sophistication than something built to withstand professional reverse engineers.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#7Many 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 were trying to skip, find that string, hop over into assembly to see what triggered loading that, and then just alter the logic to jump over it when the time comes.
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#8> I must say, this copy protection mechanism seems a bit… simplistic? A hardware dongle that just passes back a constant number? Seems like it was an appropriate amount of engineering. Looks like this took between an afternoon and a week with the help of an emulator and decompiler. Imagine trying to do this back then without those tools.
In fairness, the decompiler didn't work on the protection method :)
I think that both halves of the author's thesis are true: I bet that you could use this device in a more complicated way, but I also bet that the authors of the program deemed this sufficient. I've reversed a lot of software (both professionally and not) from that era and I'd say at least 90% of it really is "that easy," so there's nothing you're missing!
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#9Why wasn't (isn't) this more widely used? It was clearly more effective than a cdkey.
I know there is cost associated with the hardware, but surely the costumer can cough 15 more dollars.
The only reason I can think of is wanting as wide adoption before max revenue as possible. But then, this has never been too popular, not even for games!
Re: Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
#10Why wasn't (isn't) this more widely used? It was clearly more effective than a cdkey. I know there is cost associated with the hardware, but surely the costumer can cough 15 more dollars. The only reason I can think of is wanting as wide adoption before max revenue as possible. But then, this has never been too popular, not even for games!
Dongles were extremely widely used in the 1990s and early 2000s; for anything more advanced than consumer software you'd almost expect them? Almost every DAW, video editor, high-end compiler, engineering/CAD package, or 3D suite used them, certainly.
I think sometime in the late 1990s FlexLM switched from dongles to "hardware identifiers" that were easily spoofed; honestly I don't think this was a terrible idea since to this article's conclusion, if you could reverse one you could reverse the other.
But this concept was insanely prevalent for ~20 years or so.
One of the biggest problems was not having enough ports. Some parallel port dongles tried to ignore communication with other dongles and actually had a port on the back; you'd make a "dongle snake" out of them. Once they moved to USB it was both easier and harder - you couldn't make the snake anymore, but you could ask people to use a hub when they ran out of ports.