Fravia's Messageboard ~ Moderated
Re: suggestion: make *tHE* tool.(together)
Sunday, 04-Apr-99 09:56:12

In the unix world. tools are design simply, for a single purpose, and to be used together. Thus, you can pipe 'ls' to 'grep' to 'cut' to 'sed' to 'awk' and finally to 'more' without any problems.


Crackers make use of existing tools in ways the designers of those tools bever thought of: and therein lies the beauty. Yes, you could spend 2-3 years writing IDA + Soft-Ice +FileMon +RegMon +RegEdit, but what would be the point? Who would use it? The crackers already know the other tools and so have no need to invest time learning a new tool. Newbies may [or may not] be intimidated by the complexity. Much better would be to make an IDE --or use an existing one, as everyone knows I prefer Multi-Edit for my '95 cracking environment ;)-- that incorporates existing tools with front-ends that make things simple for the beginner.



For you specific purposes, I would recommend a language like Tcl [assuming it works the same under win32 as under *nix] or else the simple windows 'recoder' ... or go the whole route and write an automated front-end for the various tools.


Philosophical note: a few newcomers-to-cracking have expressed interest --on this board and others-- for making the tools we use easier to learn/use by either scripting them or re-writing them [like any of us have time for that :) ]. It is not 'knowing how to use your tools' that is the most important in a science [art? I am unconvinced] such as cracking; it is *knowing what you are doing*. No tool will provide you with the knowledge of what an OS is doing, what a program is trying to convince it to do, and what your courses of action are.

My advice? Learn the OS. Learn programming. Learn assembly and the internals of the file format you are cracking. Then the use of the tools will become apparent without having to script them :)

Just my two cents smuggled past the taxman,

_m

mammon_