[8333] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: copy protection
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Crowley)
Sun Dec 24 15:20:52 2000
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: Paul Crowley <paul@cluefactory.org.uk>
Date: 24 Dec 2000 11:32:13 +0000
In-Reply-To: "Perry E. Metzger"'s message of "24 Dec 2000 02:26:35 -0500"
Message-ID: <87zohm3via.fsf@hedonism.subnet.hedonism.cluefactory.org.uk>
"Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> writes:
> Getting around the license stuff will always be trivial, however, in
> spite of the pipe dreams of fools. If the software can be read by the
> user's computer, it can be copied. If it can be copied, automated
> tools will be developed to permit it.
"Trivial" is overstating it, I think. I've seen dongle-based license
code designed such that if you tried modifying the code to skip the
dongle check, the program's pointer arithmetic would go screwy and it
would crash in horrible ways. It was a damn clever design, which I
can't say much about here except that it depended on a fairly detailed
understanding of the innards of several parts of a large and complex
program, and so making the appropriate fix would be a sizeable job for
a very skilled and patient hacker; for example, it did not depend on
branches that were only taken when the dongle was absent.
Of course, it could be cracked, but it wouldn't have been trivial.
--
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