[John Andersen]

On Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:26:32 +0000, Laurence Payne wrote:

On Mon, 4 Jan 2010 14:45:42 -0500, John Andersen
wrote:

I wish I had a lot less clue about this stuff. I have spent too damn much
time taking apart other people's broken software.
--scott

I think you're blowing smoke.
Without the source code and considering the size of an application
like protools their is very little a lay person can do.

Someone generally manages to patch out the copy protection :-)

Generally it's the challenge response system itself that is cracked.
IOW they target the algorithm that generates the key/serial number
combination and there are various methods to doing this some of which
don't even require the program itself but only a list of valid serial
numbers and their corresponding keys. Usually this is obtained from an
insider. Once they reverse engineer the algorithm it's a simple matter
to write a keygen program to spit out a key for a given serial number.


The guys disassembling the compiled programs are not lay people nor
are they using off the shelf debuggers or disassemblers in stock form.
Specialized highly customized programs are typically used for cracking
programs like Protools and Cubase etc.

It took Team Air thousands of man hours to crack Cubase 5 and that's
with some inside information, if you can believe what's out on the
net. The time frame seems to back it up. PT 8 hasn't been cracked yet
AFAIK.
I haven't seen a crack of the iLok version of Ivory although the
challenge response older versions have been cracked I believe.

It's not something Scott could do loading cb.exe into his debugger.

--
John Andersen
I'd rather be surfin!
1/4/2010 6:47:21 PM