Software cracking (known as "breaking" mostly in the 1980s[1]) is the modification of software to remove or disable features which are considered undesirable by the person cracking the software (software cracker), especially copy protection features (including protection against the manipulation of software, serial number, hardware key, date checks and disc check) or software annoyances like nag screens and adware.
A crack refers to the means of achieving, for example a stolen serial number or a tool that performs that act of cracking.[2] Some of these tools are called keygen, patch, loader, or no-disc crack. A keygen is a handmade product serial number generator that often offers the ability to generate working serial numbers in your own name. A patch is a small computer program that modifies the machine code of another program. This has the advantage for a cracker to not include a large executable in a release when only a few bytes are changed.[3] A loader modifies the startup flow of a program and does not remove the protection but circumvents it.[4][5] A well-known example of a loader is a trainer used to cheat in games.[6] Fairlight pointed out in one of their .nfo files that these type of cracks are not allowed for warez scene game releases.[7][4][8] A nukewar has shown that the protection may not kick in at any point for it to be a valid crack.[9]
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Software cracking is closely related to reverse engineering because the process of attacking a copy protection technology, is similar to the process of reverse engineering.[10] The distribution of cracked copies is illegal in most countries. There have been lawsuits over cracking software.[11] It might be legal to use cracked software in certain circumstances.[12] Educational resources for reverse engineering and software cracking are, however, legal and available in the form of Crackme programs.
Most of the early software crackers were computer hobbyists who often formed groups that competed against each other in the cracking and spreading of software. Breaking a new copy protection scheme as quickly as possible was often regarded as an opportunity to demonstrate one's technical superiority rather than a possibility of money-making. Software crackers usually did not benefit materially from their actions and their motivation was the challenge itself of removing the protection.[14] Some low skilled hobbyists would take already cracked software and edit various unencrypted strings of text in it to change messages a game would tell a game player, often something considered vulgar. Uploading the altered copies on file sharing networks provided a source of laughs for adult users. The cracker groups of the 1980s started to advertise themselves and their skills by attaching animated screens known as crack intros in the software programs they cracked and released.[15] Once the technical competition had expanded from the challenges of cracking to the challenges of creating visually stunning intros, the foundations for a new subculture known as demoscene were established. Demoscene started to separate itself from the illegal "warez scene" during the 1990s and is now regarded as a completely different subculture. Many software crackers have later grown into extremely capable software reverse engineers; the deep knowledge of assembly required in order to crack protections enables them to reverse engineer drivers in order to port them from binary-only drivers for Windows to drivers with source code for Linux and other free operating systems. Also because music and game intro was such an integral part of gaming the music format and graphics became very popular when hardware became affordable for the home user.
The most common software crack is the modification of an application's binary to cause or prevent a specific key branch in the program's execution. This is accomplished by reverse engineering the compiled program code using a debugger such as SoftICE,[18] OllyDbg, GDB, or MacsBug until the software cracker reaches the subroutine that contains the primary method of protecting the software (or by disassembling an executable file with a program such as IDA).[19] The binary is then modified using the debugger or a hex editor such as HIEW[20] or monitor in a manner that replaces a prior branching opcode with its complement or a NOP opcode so the key branch will either always execute a specific subroutine or skip over it. Almost all common software cracks are a variation of this type. Proprietary software developers are constantly developing techniques such as code obfuscation, encryption, and self-modifying code to make this modification increasingly difficult.[21] Even with these measures being taken, developers struggle to combat software cracking. This is because it is very common for a professional to publicly release a simple cracked EXE or Retrium Installer for public download, eliminating the need for inexperienced users to crack the software themselves.
Advanced reverse engineering for protections such as SecuROM, SafeDisc, StarForce, or Denuvo requires a cracker, or many crackers to spend much more time studying the protection, eventually finding every flaw within the protection code, and then coding their own tools to "unwrap" the protection automatically from executable (.EXE) and library (.DLL) files.
There are a number of sites on the Internet that let users download cracks produced by warez groups for popular games and applications (although at the danger of acquiring malicious software that is sometimes distributed via such sites).[24] Although these cracks are used by legal buyers of software, they can also be used by people who have downloaded or otherwise obtained unauthorized copies (often through P2P networks).
If on the other hand you use a piece of software that has been changed somehow (e.g., downloaded from somewhere other than the vendor's official site, or cracked using some other automated tool), then you can't really know whether or not your software can be trusted.
In the olden days it used to be that programs would simply run a mathematical operation on the key and decide whether they accept it or not (and even earlier, there would literally be a few questions with a secret answer). The exact algorithm would be secret and hard to guess, so you would basically only be able to run the software if the developer generates a correct key for you. Crackers would reverse engineer the algorithm and generate their own keys - it's hard to see how a software could distinguish between keys generated by copyright infringers and keys generated by the developer (in fact, its ability to distinguish this was the algorithm in the first place, and that has already been defeated at this point). Granted, often the crackers then distribute the key generator with a virus in it, so there's that. 2ff7e9595c
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