April 2005
Intermediate to advanced
624 pages
16h 18m
English
Content preview from Reversing: Secrets of Reverse EngineeringBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 11. Breaking Protections
Cracking is the "dark art" of defeating, bypassing, or eliminating any kind of copy protection scheme. In its original form, cracking is aimed at software copy protection schemes such as serial-number-based registrations, hardware keys (dongles), and so on. More recently, cracking has also been applied to digital rights management (DRM) technologies, which attempt to protect the flow of copyrighted materials such as movies, music recordings, and books. Unsurprisingly, cracking is closely related to reversing, because in order to defeat any kind of software-based protection mechanism crackers must first determine exactly how that protection mechanism works.
This chapter provides some live cracking examples. I'll be going over several programs and we'll attempt to crack them. I'll be demonstrating a wide variety of interesting cracking techniques, and the level of difficulty will increase as we go along.
Why should you learn and understand cracking? Well, certainly not for stealing software! I think the whole concept of copy protections and cracking is quite interesting, and I personally love the mind-game element of it. Also, if you're interested in protecting your own program from cracking, you must be able to crack programs yourself. This is an important point: Copy protection technologies developed by people who have never attempted cracking are never effective!
Actual cracking of real copy protection technologies is considered an illegal activity ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.