Hi,

Software protection is inherently flawed. With creative use of a dongle (i.e. irretrievable *hardware* public-key encryption of critical sections of code), it is possible to create a protection second-to-none - but even that is vulnerable to several 'man-in-the-middle' and reverse-engineering attacks. It may be computationally infeasible to break a particular protection, but impossibility is not guaranteed unless a problem is not merely NP-hard but NP-complete, and in the latter case, brute force is still possible. Software protection attempts to *minimize* the impact of users defrauding the business; at this, it is most successful in many instances.

By the way: challenging someone to "crack this" seems more like a cheap attempt to have someone else work for you.

-archaios