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cracking Windows programs
Tuesday, March 22 2011
Aside from those two warm days a week or so ago, the weather has been persistently colder than normal ever since I turned off the boiler. Today my laboratory was so cold that I had difficulty working in it even when completely bundled up. The problem was my fingers, which, if temperatures are below 60, tend to get stiff when made to do work. I wanted to add some capabilities to my Arduino-based solar controller, and the only way to do that is to work at the computer at the other end of its 100 feet of serial cable. Unless, that is, some way could be found to operate that serial cable remotely across the local network. If so, I could cuddle near the woodstove with a laptop running the Arduino IDE, and I could plink away in luxurious warmth. It turns out that there are a few software packages allowing serial cables to be shared across a network, but in the world of Windows (the world I happened to find myself in), such software is never free. Now, for whatever reason, I've developed a philosophical aversion to paying for software, so I will never ever buy any software to provide this service. I will, however, happily accept any code that hackers and crackers have either hacked or cracked. Unfortunately, though, I could find no examples of serial-to-network software that anyone had hacked or cracked. I did, however, find demoware that could theoretically be cracked. But how? In the late-early 1990s I had a lot of experience cracking Macintosh software (turning JNEs to JMPs and replacing strings of pirate-thwarting code with NOPs), but I've never had a strong need to crack Windows software; any time I needed PC software cracked, someone had already done it and I was happy not to have to reinvent the wheel. That is, until today.
Not really knowing where to begin, I did a Google search for "cracking software" and soon came upon a trove of Youtube videos showing precisely what to do. Most Windows software crackers today use a freeware debugger called OllyDbg, which allows some simple interactive patching using a line-at-a-time assembler. It's a much easier process than afforded by trusty customized copy of ResEdit (back eighteen years ago when I was cracking Mac software). Unfortunately, though, the program I needed to crack today was a bit more complicated than any of the examples I found on Youtube. It contained no plaintext error strings, at least that I could see. But it's a fun new puzzle I can plink away at at my leisure. Being able to crack (or otherwise modify) Windows programs would be a nice little technical arrow in my quiver.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110322 feedback
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