10 replies to this topic

[Lop]

Interesting read/website:
http://www.inner-smi...m/nocrack.phtml

It talks about how to make your software harder to crack.

Quote

Finding out that the program on which you worked for months or years has been cracked can really hurt and demotivate.

[Lop]

Some points I found interesting:

Avoid nagscreens or "Gotcha!" messages - this is what crackers are searching first. They will never dig through the 300K ASM instructions of your program - instead, they are first searching the location of nagscreens or your "Your evaluation time has expired!" message and start cracking there (see below for more tips about that). In some cases, it's even enough to remove the form resource from the EXE and it will show no nagscreen anymore - without any bug showing up! If you really need such a nagscren, you should build it dynamically at runtime, and generally, the only method to show the user that he is unregistered should be in the "about" dialog (some programmers also have the philosophy that nagscreens might cause your users to hate your app which would then also be very stupid).

Store serial numbers in unlikely places like as a property of a database field. Often heard and read: "..give it a DLL file name and store it in the System directory." Too often heard, don't use it. ;-)

Store serial numbers in several places. <--- Good point!

[Ronin]

Nice thing to read, although I don't thing you will need very heavy security when you first release a program, maybe when your programs gets some attention you should think about making it more secure in an updated version.

[moonrise]

this is a new message to me i have never though this could be done

[sigs]

yea thats good

[Void]

I think the last two are the best.

Also, you can have the users register online, if possible. This is a good way to prevent hacking. If they have to register online and against a database that says whether the reg-code is valid or not it makes it harder to pass around codes. They can still just crack your program though.

[M.Jordan]

Void said:

I think the last two are the best.

Also, you can have the users register online, if possible. This is a good way to prevent hacking. If they have to register online and against a database that says whether the reg-code is valid or not it makes it harder to pass around codes. They can still just crack your program though.

The dlls store that info dude and if u can hack dll that needs that u can hack the registration part also. So 100% hack proof software doesnt exists .

[Dan]

Unfortunately if a script/software is popular enough then it will get cracked sooner or later, I don't believe anything is "uncrackable" and anybody who says so is pretty foolish IMO.

If I was writing/selling software, I would encrypt the code, offer a very limited demo (which expired) and ensure the that all users had to register over the internet, and I manually approved their copy of the software.

I think internet registration is the way to go, but then crackers can just write keygens...

It is a hard one to stop really.