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.