NewLC - How to protect your application against a keygen - Comments

How to protect your application against a keygen

krisha — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:55:18 +0200

why is the value multiplied and then divided again by same value ? that's not clearly stated in the article.

some ARM compilers do this instead of an AND, in this case it was & 0xFFFF . converting it to decimal numbers and calculating with it makes no sense imho :-)

btw. IDA has no feature to emulate ARM and of course also not symbian :) TriX

> How to crack a symbian application: writing a keygen

THE OLD GENTLEMAN — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 13:08:15 +0200

everything is created because I NEED TO DESTROY... everything in informatics has problems.. dont forget this

Someone from ALBANIA

how to make our application have serial number ???

rachmat aditiya — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 13:17:35 +0200

I just wanna ask how to make our application have serial number... can you give me an example, maybe u can make dict application with serial

> How to crack a symbian application: writing a keygen

eric — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 14:56:12 +0100

Nevber thought about this.... but that's quite clever ;-) !!!

> How to crack a symbian application: writing a keygen

Anonymous — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 20:14:38 +0100

I'm surprised I don't hear more developers advocating my approach; why fight the crackers? Use them! I always create and distribute my own crack for my applications. It's not a full crack, of course (downloaders don't know this), but instead they get a slightly longer or different type of trial. The download link given will be for a site where I need download counts for optimum promotional placement. The presence of my crack discourages others from attempting to crack it; only one outside crack has ever appeared for my apps, and I 'drowned it out' with new releases of my own crack. I then patched my software so only my crack would 'work'.

> How to crack a symbian application: writing a keygen

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 10:01:28 +0100

thanx for the link , i only had a older version of ida pro.. and shhh, dont talk about how cracking is done. security through obscurity.. works best ;-)

> How to crack a symbian application: writing a keygen

Wild_One — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 22:05:31 +0100

So, I'm cracker. I want to tell you: don't waste your time for antihack protection. You may be sure that we will crack it. It's better for you to make your programs better. Make good and necessary program - and people'll pay for them. About tools. Olly debug is only for Windows OS PE-files. You can find another debuggers for Symbian. You can download IDA here: I don't like this article. This is just retelling another one. Anyway if you want to make good protection you must be a good cracker.

> How to crack a symbian application: writing a keygen

Anonymous — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 19:51:42 +0100

Search on google OLLYDBG or Olly Debugger, it's amazing to debuggin any kind of software !!! Use it whit responsability, it colud be dangerous if this info reach the cracker hands (LOL) or you may visit http://www.ollydbg.de/

> How to crack a symbian application: writing a keygen

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 14:35:07 +0200

You have to know the basics to do good copy protection. Anyway, this info is available from everywhere and if you're smart enough, you can figure it out your self. And in real world, things are often more complicated than this. This is only simple scenario and only amateurs will do copy protection like this.

So I think this is helpful for all the developers there. This is endless journey anyway.

> How to protect your application against a keygen

Drew — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 23:23:26 +0200

I think this is a useful contribution if you want to improve your protection routines - there are all sorts of security-advisory sites out there that point out vulnerabilities in software along with example code, not to mention other articles like this but for different platforms. Kiddie scripters can quite easily go to these to figure out how to break everything. I would recommend finding some general pc cracking articles/tutorials (there are plenty of eZines on this subject to be found with a quick google) and reading up on the enemy's tactics as well, which is in essence what this article is about - it just makes it that bit harder them to crack something if you've taken measures to avoid the common pitfalls. There would be no point in including better protection solutions as it would then be in the public domain, and therefore easily available to crackers, rendering it useless! At the end of the day I'd have to say I'm not really sure IMEI or IMSI-based registration is a particularly good solution to start with however. I have no suggestions for alternatives, as even keys based on other data like names and email addresses can be easily cracked.

A good (and interesting) read on the general subject of security (including cryptography) is the book "Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems" by Ross Anderson.

Despite all of what I've just said, My preferred solution is to not use any protection in the first place, and point out to the user that I have faith in their good-will not to distribute my work. Yes, that's very idealistic but chances are someone will figure out how to crack your program if they want it bad enough - I'd rather spend my time making the program more appealing to people in the first place. There will always be crackers, so concentrate on attracting more legitimate registered users in the first place to make up for the percieved revenue-loss.

Peace, Drew

> How to crack a symbian application: writing a keygen

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 15:17:41 +0100

However you program it, someone will crack it.

The only thing is that you can do is to give them a good challenge.

Imei lock may keep the causal bypassers from copying it.

Cracker will crack it. You may increase the time it takes to do so from 2 hours to 2 days.

> How to crack a symbian application: writing a keygen

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 00:04:49 +0100

Sex is free? Hmm. Yeah, and when you go to bars, the beers are free? :-)

> How to crack a symbian application: writing a keygen

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 20:15:10 +0100

My Opinion: Software is like sex, it's better when it's free!

> How to crack a symbian application: writing a keygen

Anonymous — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 10:54:08 +0100

Yes, the last sentence in the first block of text is quite clear that someone else wrote the body of the article itself.

Eric is usually VERY careful about that kind of stuff.

> How to crack a symbian application: writing a keygen

eric — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 09:08:02 +0100

I think he has quoted this in the article. Hasn't he ?

How to protect your application against a keygen

eric — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 00:11:12 +0100

This article will show you the issues of IMEI and IMSI based registration and how a hacker can defeat such protection.