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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