Now, what's next? Is it the end of software protectors?

[CrackZ]

I'm going to take a contrary view to the preamble that its "the end of protectors" as we know it. To address the original points:

1. Vista has given the protection world a temporary headache in that the larger commercial offerings regard "MS Certification / Runs in Vista logos" as a must. Since making modifications to OS structures is never going to be 'certified' the days of lower level
hacking/protecting seem numbered, at least on a large scale, this was pretty much the case at XP launch time as well but eventually they found a way.

2. The authors didn't run out of ideas, they simply realised for every "new technique" you find to frustrate crackers the code eventually gets analysed and documented, what they have ALL realised is that a custom VM will require much larger scale analysis (as Shub has already pointed out), the cutting edge of the games scene has known this for years and continues to implement this approach, this will continue to be a viable business model where games sell most of their legitamate copies in the first 3 months. If you spend a month of your time reversing a VM for free, frankly you need to be working for these companies ;-).

3. The cracking community definitely hasn't won, in fact its going to lose out long term; protectors have realised the 1997 maxim from Stone of "if it runs, it can be defeated....." so I expect to start seeing much more common custom hardware (software on chip), custom VM's and eventually some sort of thin-client over the Internet software model (where you pay for a server license and most of the code executes there), thereby coining my own maxim of "if it doesn't run on your computer, you can't crack it ;-)". 2 of these approaches render software reverse engineering a dead duck.

In short then, lets enjoy this temporary golden age, because it isn't going to last forever.

Regards

CrackZ.

[Sabor]

I must say nice post to the poster. Interesting points you noticed.

Protection is not dead; wont be dead ever. Protection will be around as long as there is a fear of theft/crackers/hackers etc.

Reversers will never die out as long as there is something to crack.

These two industries fuel each other. Antivirus needs viruses writers, and virus writers need something to-do, and most of the time they work for antivirus companies anyways. Billions of dollars at hand.

In terms of system on chip and thin clients, only problem is universal adoption. Will never happen. Everyone has there own ways of doing things and it just won��t happen. Also most companies wont like the idea of having their proprietary info stored on remote server farms where some China men can come in and hack out the newest golf club designs. Besides, it will be infeasible to phase out the comfort everyone has grown to with their own system, much like it is hard to phase out the cars on the road in the United States vs going on trams/trains; everyone is comfortable with their own control which server farms dont give. System on chip is prone to the same fate vulnerabilities as dongles. Not to mention the amount of debugging and effort put into such designs wont be viable for everyday software producers, also updates, errors, hardware failure, stolen devices, cloned devices, etc. I see this being hard, but again isolated cases could work (though I haven��t seen one in 15+ years that survived). I am sure some people on this forum are very good hardware hackers as well, and as time continues will become just as effecient as software reversers.

There can be a few isolated cases where a application is online based only, but even in this has a new form of cracking in hacking and different kind of approaches. Imagine a trend of hacking an internet application and rehosting it on your windows vista home server. Industry demands that software be localized for most cases, as they cannot rely on a third party, or lightning storms cutting down your wimax connection, or your server farm going bankrupt etc etc. So let the best protection win the most money.

We will continue to fuel each other. The best things to come are the methods of code mutation/VM. This will be increasingly grow in complexity. Then something new will come out like quantum computers and the cycle will repeat.

Great post though, as far as the now goes, lots of slowdown on certain sectors and still so much room for improvement, I guess everyone just cashed in and some others failed so you get the current draught that exist now. Not to mention all the new talent is just great lately. There are some great new posters I seen lately here that really just tear these software protectors a new one (deroko, fly, the russkies, the dks, the de's)

I dont remember what i typed so far but i do realize I might have triggered every counties "echelon" by now with all keywords and statements made in this post.

DONGS