Choosing a protector

again, another wrong way to think about protection. don't ask 'will this protector be better than another' cuz the truth of the matter is if the protector is interesting enough to catch someone's attention (along with your app) then it WILL be cracked, unpacked, whatever. try as you might, you are NOT gonna keep your app from the hands of and experienced reverser. that's just a fact.

what you should be looking at is the best balance of ease of implementation along with the best possible protection. in other words, think of your customers/potential customers. don't use a protection that slows down your app! if you used asprotect correctly and properly encrypted 'registered only' functions you'd be better off. and even then, if your app is desireable, chances are it will simply be subject to credit card fraud just to get all the locked up goodies.

again, cuz it seems that it can't be said enough, stop worrying about reversers, cuz you're not gonna stop them. think about how to make using your app an enjoyable experience for your customers.

bollygud, good points. I hope we all can avoid the "everything is crackable" discussion, since I am in complete agreement with that statement. The honest customer really is the only one who pays for the product, and so it really boils down to helping that honest customer comply with licensing.

I played around with Licenturion's demo app (a wrapped Tetris) and didn't find it too interesting. To get their SDK, I think it requires signing up.. but the unlock process for their demo app was simple enough. Their site says that they'll license the first 25k copies of one single application for free.

I installed Armadillo and found it to be pretty straightforward, although their 'network concurrent licenses' mode looks like an extremely bad implementation of other vendors' "floating licenses". I have not yet installed ASProtect, but expect it to be pretty much the same as Armadillo. That's next on my list.

SVKP... thanks for the suggestion, imagin. I'll look it up as well and give it a shot.

The tools cost pretty much the same. Is there anyone on the forum who's using any of these tools today for a legit purpose ( not to say that RE is not legit! ) who had to make the choice between them? If so, which did they choose and why?

Steve

[dyn!o]

stevematulis: you are losing your time here. The stuff you mentioned is all the same. I don't know Licenturion but I bet it posses the same idea as ASProtect/Armadillo clones.

You see, all of nowadays protectors uses outdated idea of:

- envelope
- "stolen bytes"
- API redirection
- silly anti-debug/dump/bla bla features

What about amazing polymorph/metamorph/hybrid encryption/virtual machines like features? Nothing. People using such naming usually don't know what it means and what is the difference between polymorph/metamorph/hybrid encryption/vm, etc.

Save your time and choose a random one. If your software is popular, it will be cracked.

Good luck.