New software encryption method

[Maximus]

One of the strongest reverser I knew took 3 weeks to get the way of the cd-check from scratch... and you cracked SF in ONE hour?!?!

_oh my god_

you are not joking, really?!?!
(What's wrong with their business practice? I noticed they lowered alot the prices quite time ago, but I didnt relate this to such event mmh...)


Maximus

[dyn!o]

starforce really depends on the amount of protection added

That is the peculiarity of every vm based protection.

i cracked starforce in under 1 hour generically, just depends on how heavy the protection is...

StarForce PE wrapper on the titles they protect without changing target's source code? That is possible but I hope you did not had in mind StarForce vm patching/removal/rebuilding.

(What's wrong with their business practice? I noticed they lowered alot the prices quite time ago, but I didnt relate this to such event mmh...)

They do not really have any "business practice". Their PR is much worse than ExeTools one (keeping in mind that ExeTools does not have and does not need any). I am not joking. Sometimes it is better to talk nothing (SecuROM) instead of old slogans (SafeDisc) and graceless statements (Tages, StarForce).

That is not important anyway since, IMHO, it wasn't the thing which stopped StarForce (slowed down?). Their marketing is poor but software security market does not really care about such topics. They did only one mistake, giving all the opponents the best weapon they could ever receive... but that is another story.

Regards.

Well, I didn't expect my initial post to create this ammount of responses.

To make it easier to understand once again, how do VM-protectors work?

1. Do they have their own C++ cross-compiler which compiles all code to the VM-bytecode
or
2. Do they just take the compiled x86 code and analyse it in the same way ObjAntiHack also does?

The answer is most likely "2". The VM protector does not work without the step which ObjAntiHack does, so "it is already used in nearly every protector having some kind of VM features", isn't it?

[evlncrn8]

Originally Posted by Maximus

One of the strongest reverser I knew took 3 weeks to get the way of the cd-check from scratch... and you cracked SF in ONE hour?!?!

_oh my god_

you are not joking, really?!?!

nope, not joking, had to do a crack fix after it though because the e9 redirects had +400000 added to where they should have gone heh

also had 3 vm blocks (really ripped bink code. and some code from the c lib)

it was a complete rebuild, not just a cdcheck bypass.. i had the original disk so i didnt have to bother with that bit (which is admittedly a total pain)

and having to read through the 38mb logfile my tool produced wasn't fun either

(What's wrong with their business practice? I noticed they lowered alot the prices quite time ago, but I didnt relate this to such event mmh...)

their business practice is really 'persuading' their customer that their software will get cracked - they got in trouble recently by posting a torrent link to 'prove' their claims...their support also sucks as they mostly always claim the user is a pirate...

and cracking starforce is just time consuming, their api crap is pretty easily reversed once you see a flaw in their 'morphing' code, the only tricky part is from the vm bounce back (from r3->r0->r3 again)...

and again, cracking it is heavily dependant on whats actually implimented, the one i did had 2 vm calls, 700 or so 'hidden' files, and about 30 e9 redirects,

breed for example is a pretty simple one... pacman worlds is a fair bit tougher, but the vm calls in that are all bink crap, so if you analyse another bink exe you'll see how it was done...