Freaks Macintosh Archive/Freaks Macintosh Archive.bin/Freaks Macintosh Archives/Textfiles/zines/Reptile/Reptile 1.1.sit/Reptile 1.1.rsrc/TEXT_140.txt

Text File | 1997-05-27 | 14KB | 252 lines

              The alternative to policing is burglar-proofing:
              making things harder to crack. In principle, you
              might think that the gazillion-dollar software
              industry would be able to produce uncrackable
              software. In practice, it can't, although it
              certainly keeps trying.

              Take the dongle, for example. It is the summit of
              copy protection, an explicit melding of software
              and hardware. Without the right hardware key -
              the dongle - plugged into the machine's parallel
              port, the software won't run. And without the
              right software, the dongle is a mindless
              doorstop. Calls to the dongle are woven into the
              code at the lowest level. "The program may call
              the dongle every 150 mouseclicks, or every time
              you print, or every time you select flesh tones
              as your desktop color scheme," says one dongle
              expert. If the response to the call is false or not
              forthcoming, the program shuts down. All
              communications between the two are encrypted
              by uncrackable algorithms. Internal security
              fuses ensure that any attempt to hack the dongle
              mechanically will cause it to self-destruct.
              "Nothing short of an electron microscope," says
              the expert, "could extract the algorithm from
              that mess."

              The biggest player in the dongle market is
              Rainbow Technologies, whose Sentinel hardware
              keys are used by 55 percent of all protected
              software. There are 8 million Sentinel keys
              attached to 8 million printer ports the world
              over. The company calls it "the world's most
              effective way to stop piracy" - a clarion call to
              crackers if ever there was.

              The logical approach to cracking a hardware key
              is to create a "pseudodongle" - a chunk of code
              that sits in memory, giving the correct answers
              to any query. To do this, a cracker would have to
              monitor and trap traffic to-ing and fro-ing
              across the parallel port, then use this
              information to build an infallible
              query/response table. Unfortunately, if the query
              is, say, six characters long, it can have more
              than 280 trillion responses
              (281,474,976,710,700 to be exact). With the
              speed of modern machines, this would take
              approximately 44,627 years to collate. With the
              SentinelSuperPro dongle ("the most secure and
              flexible protection available") the query length
              can be 56 characters - requiring a mere 10 125
              years (in theory) for a complete table. However,
              the dongle in SentinelSuperPro for Autodesk 3D
              Studio MAX was cracked in just under seven days
              of its retail release - substantially less than
              the 44 millennia emblazoned on the sales
              brochures. Other expensive high-end applications
              that use Sentinel - including NewTek's
              LightWave 5 and Microsoft's SoftImage - have
              ended up the same way: cracked, repackaged, and
              redistributed to every corner of the Internet
              within weeks of their release. How? Instead of
              attempting to simulate the dongle, expert
              crackers simply remove its tendrils from the
              program code, unraveling the relationship skein
              by skein, function by function, call by call, until
              the application ceases to need the dongle to
              function. Then it's ready for anyone and everyone
              to use - or, more likely, gawk at.

              Nobody says this is easy. There may be only
              three or four crackers in the world who could
              manage such an opus. But with the Internet to
              transmit the result, only one needs to succeed.

              With the latest wave of dongles, warez world
              looked to Russia to get the job done - and a
              shadowy group called DOD "won" the contract.
              The self-styled "Warez Bearz of Russia and
              Beyond," DOD appears to have arms throughout
              Europe, Asia, and the US. It undid Microsoft
              SoftImage's dongle protection in two weeks,
              which wasn't easy. The crew riotously
              celebrated in their "NFO" file: "Totally awesome
              work of glorious DOD cracker - Replicator after
              five other crackers gave up! We decided not a do
              a crack patch 'coz it will take too much time to
              code it ... you ask why? 'Coz there are only 72 (!!!)
              EXEs patched. All options now work 100%!"

              NFO files do more than brag or supply
              installation instructions; they testify that the
              ware is a bona fide release, guaranteed to work.
              And this is more than just posturing; a group's
              reputation is paramount. Each release is
              painstakingly beta-tested. These are their
              products now, their labors of love. Nobody wants
              to find a "bad crack" in his hands after a
              seven-hour download. Nobody wants to be
              accused of being "unprofessional." Nobody wants
              the ignominy of anything like the bad crack for
              Autodesk's 3D Studio that made the rounds in
              1992. For all intents and purposes it ran
              correctly, all features seemed 100 percent
              functional. Except that the dedongled program
              slowly and subtly corrupted any 3-D model built
              with it. After a few hours of use, a mesh would
              become a crumpled mass of broken triangles,
              irrevocably damaged. Cleverly, Autodesk had
              used the dongle to create a dynamic vector table
              within the program. Without the table, the
              program struggled to create mathematically
              accurate geometry - and eventually failed. Many
              a dodgy CAD house saw its cost-cutting
              measures end in ruin. Autodesk support forums
              and newsgroups were flooded with strangely
              unregistered users moaning about the "bug in
              their version of 3D Studio." A rectified "100
              percent cracked" version appeared soon after,
              but the damage was done. The Myth of the Bad
              Crack was born, and the pirate groups'
              reputations tarnished.

              But the pirates bounced back. They always do.
              And there's no reason to think that there's any
              way to stop them. Software security people are
              at an intrinsic disadvantage. Compare their job
              to that of securing something in the real world
              that's valuable and under threat - a bank, say.
              Typically, only one set of armed robbers will
              hold up a bank at a time, and they'll get only one
              crack at it. Imagine an army of robbers, all in
              different parts of the world, all attacking the
              same bank at the same time. And in the comfort
              of their own homes. Not just once, but over and
              over again. Imagine that each set of robbers is
              competing against every other, racing to be first
              in. Imagine, too, that some of the robbers are so
              technically adept that they could have built the
              alarms, the safe, and even the jewels
              themselves. And that they have cracked more
              than 30 banks with the same protection system.
              And that they're learning from all their failures,
              because they're never caught. No security could
              realistically resist such an onslaught. It may be
              that the only way to avoid having your software
              cracked is to put no protection whatsoever on it.
              No challenge, no crack.

              Popularity only feeds the frenzy. Doom is a good
              example. In 1993, id Software distributed the
              original shareware version of its
              nasty-guns-in-nasty-dungeons masterpiece on
              bulletin boards, CompuServe, and a
              then-little-known system called the Internet.
              Downloaded by more than 6 million people
              worldwide, Doom was a trailblazer in the world
              of modem marketing. The shareware gave you a
              third of the game: if you liked it, you had to buy
              the rest on disks. Millions did.

              Doom and its makers became a dream target.
              Weeks before Doom II's release, the sequel was
              available on the Internet - not as shareware, but
              warez. And not just as a teaser, but the whole
              damn thing. "Yeah, that was leaked," says Mike
              Wilson, id's then-vice president of marketing,
              now CEO at Ion Storm. "Can't tell you how much
              that hurt." The leaked copy was rapidly traced -
              rumors abounded that the version was a review
              copy fingerprinted to a British PC games
              magazine - but too late. It was already on
              Usenet, doing the rounds on IRC, filling up FTP
              sites. The pirates were in ecstasy and id was
              left with recoding the final retail release, to
              ensure future patches and upgrades would not
              work on the pirated version. Then they shut the
              stable door. No more external beta testing; no
              more prelaunch reviews. "We assured ourselves
              it would never happen again," says Wilson. "No
              copy of our games would leave the building."

              Nice try. Quake, Doom's much-anticipated
              follow-up, turned up on an FTP server in Finland
              three days before the shareware come-on was
              due to be released. The pirate version was a
              final beta of the full game - complete with
              eerily empty unfinished levels and bare,
              unartworked walls. Within hours, it had been
              funneled to sites all over the globe. IRC was
              swamped with traders and couriers desperate to
              download.

              "Somebody actually broke into our then poorly
              secured network and started to download it
              right before our eyes," Wilson recalls. "We
              managed to stop the transfer before he got all of
              it. We traced the call, got his name and address.
              He was pretty scared, but, of course, it was
              some kid. We didn't pursue that one. It hurt, but
              not enough to put some little kid in jail."

              When the legitimate Quake hit the stores last
              year, it was initially in the form of an encrypted
              CD, which let you play a shareware version for
              free but would only unlock the rest on receipt of
              a password, available for purchase by phone. The
              encryption scheme, an industry standard called
              TestDrive, was eventually cracked by a lone
              European pirate called Agony. And id's crown
              jewel was now available, courtesy a 29K
              program. "In order to unlock the full version, you
              are supposed to call 1-800-IDGAMES," Agony
              gloated in a posting. "Hahahahahah."

              "We knew it was going to be hacked," says
              Wilson. "We of all people knew. But we thought it
              was safe enough, certainly safer than Doom II."
              And, truth to tell, it didn't matter too much. The
              gap between the game's release and the warez
              version becoming widespread was enough for id
              to sell the copies they expected.
              "Copy-protection schemes are just speed
              bumps," laments Wilson.

              Nobody really knows how much actual damage
              cracking does to the software companies. But as
              the industry rolls apprehensively toward the
              uncertain future of an ever-more frictionless
              electronic marketplace, almost everyone thinks
              piracy will increase. "The level of activity out
              there is overwhelming. We know that we have to
              take action to take control of it. We will
              continue to bring a critical mass of
              prosecutions," says Novell UK's Smith. He doesn't
              sound all that convinced.

              Somewhere back on the US East Coast, Mad
              Hatter has a final swig of ginger ale and settles
              down to bed with his wife, White Rabbit. She
              thinks his obsession is a wasted resource, but
              didn't complain when he installed the latest
              version of Quicken on her computer - a cracked
              copy, of course. "We are all family men, married
              with children, day jobs, dedicated accounts, and
              multiple phone lines," Mad Hatter says. "Our kids
              have been looking over our shoulders for years.
              They will be the next couriers, the next warez
              gods."