Antipiracy: softworkz (any comments?)

thamarok · Post by **thamarok** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 6:08 pm

ricardo wrote:
thamarok wrote: Calm down, it was a joke. I didn't know you don't like jokes that badly. I am sorry and I like spanish people, *my girlfriend is spanish*
Sorry if i react bad
I dont notice it was a joke

BTW im not spanish, im from Argentina

No problem!
I have some friends from Argentina and they are very good people, so I can imagine that you are also a good guy

Tipperton · Post by **Tipperton** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 12:36 am

Fluid Byte wrote:Tipperton, do you have a website?

I did.

But I took it down because I didn't know if the site and selling my software through it would be a violation of the non-compete clause in the employment agreement for my current job.

I'll eventually try to find out if it would be or not, and if not, I'll set it up again.

Wouldn't bother me one way or the other since it was just a hobby and not an attempt to make a living off it.

White Eagle · Post by **White Eagle** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 12:43 am

I guess if you never distribute your program, Armadillo or any protection for that matter, would be "100% secure'. ROFL

Tipperton · Post by **Tipperton** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 5:06 pm

White Eagle wrote:I guess if you never distribute your program, Armadillo or any protection for that matter, would be "100% secure'. ROFL

I would tell you what you can do with your remarks, but not in a public place....

Besides, I never said that haven't ever distributed my programs, just that they are not being distributed or sold at the moment until I'm sure that doing so doesn't violate the non-compete clause in my employment contact.

(It's been about six months since I took the site down)

To be honest, I really don't care what you think, all I know is that Armadillo works for me and that's enough.

Fluid Byte · Post by **Fluid Byte** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 6:44 pm

Although White Eagle's comment was a little "unpolite" (yet funny) there's a little truth in there. It's hard to make us belive that using Armadillo in addition to your custom security integrity checks will make an application somewhat safe while keeping in mind that (as you stated) your products aren't distributed anymore since six months. And as far as I understood there are no other places where we can check out one of your applications.

ricardo · Post by **ricardo** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 8:01 pm

Tipperton wrote: To be honest, I really don't care what you think, all I know is that Armadillo works for me and that's enough.

Okay, if its enough for you its fine. I don't think we are interested on denie your words.

The problem is that this is a public forum and we are talking about finding solutions that works for others too and the question was "How much did Armadillo will protect some highly downloaded software?".

I have some solutions that works fine for me (change registration algorithm 2 or 3 times per week to make obsolete keygens) but im interested on adding MORE weapons to this antipiracy fight, that why i started asking opinions.

ricardo · Post by **ricardo** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 8:03 pm

Some friend recommend ASProtect for protecting apps (not as unique solution but as one more)

Any experience with this software?

localmotion34 · Post by **localmotion34** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 9:27 pm

Yes. So easy to unpack with StripperX 2.09 alpha, its ridiculous.

ricardo · Post by **ricardo** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 10:57 pm

localmotion34 wrote:Yes. So easy to unpack with StripperX 2.09 alpha, its ridiculous.

Which one is not that easy to unpack?

White Eagle · Post by **White Eagle** » Thu Oct 19, 2006 3:26 am

I know is that Armadillo works for me

Since we were discussing security issues with Armadillo, I still don't see how you can jump in and praise Armadillo's security when you obviously don't trust it for your own needs.

By your own admission Armadillo's protection is NOT enough for you and you also integrate your own routines, which somewhat reaffirms what I originally said about Armadillo. Since Armadillo itself is so easily bypassed by the crackers (not an opinion, a fact that can be verified by browsing warez boards), and has been for years, it would seem that the true protection is being provided by your own routines.

Like it or not, Armadillo is a major target for "crackers", and there is a huge rivalry between the two. Armadillo used to stay one step ahead of the crackers, for the past couple of years the crackers have been one step ahead of Armadillo.

White Eagle · Post by **White Eagle** » Thu Oct 19, 2006 7:01 am

Which one is not that easy to unpack?

Take a browse through here, maybe you might find something to meet your needs.

Tipperton · Post by **Tipperton** » Thu Oct 19, 2006 1:31 pm

White Eagle wrote:I still don't see how you can jump in and praise Armadillo's security when you obviously don't trust it for your own needs.

Maybe so, but then I wouldn't fully trust any protection system....read on....

White Eagle wrote:By your own admission Armadillo's protection is NOT enough for you and you also integrate your own routines,

You completely missed my point or maybe I didn't do a good job of wording it, so I'll try again....

Based on experience both on the outside as a user of Armdillo and on the inside as one of Armadillo's developers with Digital River, if all you do is wrap your unmodified program, you are going to get cracked. Its too easy to dump a running process to disk, then rebuild the EXE from there. This is not a weakness of just Armadillo but is shared by any protection system.

The answer is to actively participate in the protection of your program by adding secondary defenses and by making your program as dependant on the protection system's available resources so that after it is dumped, the cracker still has a huge task ahead of him of finding and dissabling all your added defenses.

For me it doesn't matter what protection system I'm using and besides Armadillo there are a number of very good ones available; StrongBit's EXECryptor and Orean's Themida/WinLicnese to name a couple. I would still not trust any of them fully and would always want to have additional defenses in my programs and to make them as tightly dependant on the protection system as possible.

I know of a number of other Armadillo users who do have products currently on-line that are just as active in participating in the protection process as I am that, like me, have numerous posted cracks of their programs, but none of the cracks are fully functional because many of the secondary defenses were missed.

My opinion (and it is just my opion) is that if a developer isn't willing to spend some extra time and effort to actively participate in the protection process, then maybe their program isn't worth protecting at all or they are just lazy.

rsts · Post by **rsts** » Thu Oct 19, 2006 1:50 pm

I believe newsleecher uses (or at least to use) armadillo and cracks for it, while available, were largely unsuccessful or very problematic. Of course, part of that was due to the code in newsleecher, but it was still a rather effective combination.

cheers

ricardo · Post by **ricardo** » Thu Oct 19, 2006 3:08 pm

White Eagle wrote:
Which one is not that easy to unpack?
Take a browse through here, maybe you might find something to meet your needs.

Thanks.

But im asking (because im not well informed about this topics) if some of this systems are better or more difficult to crack that others.

I was testing ASPack (per example) and yesterday i found here that its easily crackeable, so don't want to wate my time/money in something that are not much secure.

Tipperton · Post by **Tipperton** » Thu Oct 19, 2006 4:28 pm

One thing you have to be very careful of is to consider what you are protecting.

EXECryptor is supposed to be very good and very difficult to crack but is almost worthless for protecting DarkBasic programs.

This is because DarkBasic appends your compiled program to the end of a run-time "stub" so all EXECryptor's efforts are focused on the run-time "stub" and zero protection is offered for your appended program!

I haven't tried but I suspect it would be fairly easy to take the appended program and stick it on the end of an unprotected run-time "stub" to crack it, all without having to even bother with cracking EXECryptor itself.