make a crypter

[Michel]

You are right, from my point of vue, the Tao's idea is not very original and will never go to a strong protection (no dump, no keygen, no direct decrypt).

I think one of the most serious protection would be to delocalize some part of the app on a server, wich verify on his list if the user is registered. I don't see what I could do... Fortunally for the badboys, that's seems however a little heavy...

[dyn!o]

Hmm.... the idea of online authorization has been already implemented several times. The newest pretenders are Half Life 2 and IDA. We (they) still have a problem since no matter what part of software you chose to be taken from the server, it always must be executed on the local machine. IDA developers seems to become quite different by proposing an online server as the engine's brain. For sure this makes cracking impossible but who will buy IDA based on online engine? For sure not me. The same reason will significantly decrease their sales, forcing part of legal users to use pirated version of IDA.

Ok. that was only unique example and it was based on an unique kind of software which may be indeed executed on a remote machine because the purpose of that software may be compared rather to a service, not a casual software product. Let's go back to "usual" software like games and applications - these just cannot be executed online. The reason is even simpler than the problem.

Approximately 99% of the software must be executed on the local machine and therefore you are free to crack it. The protection of the future should allow the cracker to analyse it but should not allow to modify its content. This can be made by making the code dependend on its own - its execution should be based on own functions making its patching useless (e.g. hashing, jumps, checksums as pointers, etc. ). The first example of such a solution we can find in Starforce - you can analyse it but it's very hard to change a single byte inside because of dependencies. The people able to crack it we can count on the fingers of a single hand.

Regards.