357Cracking is the “dark art” of defeating, bypassing, or eliminating any kind of
copy protection scheme. In its original form, cracking is aimed at software
copy protection schemes such as serial-number-based registrations, hardware
keys (dongles), and so on. More recently, cracking has also been applied to dig-
ital rights management (DRM) technologies, which attempt to protect the flow
of copyrighted materials such as movies, music recordings, and books. Unsur-
prisingly, cracking is closely related to reversing, because in order to defeat
any kind of software-based protection mechanism crackers must first deter-
mine exactly how that protection mechanism works.
This chapter provides some live cracking examples. I’ll be going over sev-
eral programs and we’ll attempt to crack them. I’ll be demonstrating a wide
variety of interesting cracking techniques, and the level of difficulty will
increase as we go along.
Why should you learn and understand cracking? Well, certainly not for
stealing software! I think the whole concept of copy protections and cracking
is quite interesting, and I personally love the mind-game element of it. Also, if
you’re interested in protecting your own program from cracking, you must be
able to crack programs yourself. This is an important point: Copy protection
technologies developed by people who have never attempted cracking are
never effective!
Actual cracking of real copy protection technologies is considered an illegal
activity in most countries. Yes, this chapter essentially demonstrates cracking,