Vulnerability Development mailing list archives
Re: spoofing the ethernet address (license managers)
From: forrestc () IMACH COM (Forrest W. Christian)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 22:36:26 -0700
On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, Michael Wojcik wrote:
Yes, people have proposed arcane, byzantine schemes like encrypting portions of the program, scattering license checks through it, etc. Sooner or later, though, the software has to decide to trust something that's under the user's control.
This reminds me of the Apple II days, when all of the above were attempted and some of them were somewhat successful, at least for a while. I remember when the "holy grail" of deprotection was Microsoft Flight Simulator - They used some funky obscure code which basically accessed the disk in ways the designer never intended. Nothing could copy it very reliably as a result, and it was out for at least a year or so before someone successfully figured out how to extract it onto an easily copyable disk in a form that would work. But the short version is that no matter the copy protection someone will figure a way around it. I fully agree with the rest the (trimmed) message that the real purpose of licensing is to help keep those honest people honest. I think people should look at ways to help count software which needs to be licensed. For this, the mac-address based scheme might be useful, as it does tend to provide a unique (at least in an enterprise) identifier for a computer. - Forrest W. Christian (forrestc () imach com) KD7EHZ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- iMach, Ltd., P.O. Box 5749, Helena, MT 59604 http://www.imach.com Solutions for your high-tech problems. (406)-442-6648 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Current thread:
- Re: spoofing the ethernet address (license managers) Michael Wojcik (Mar 27)
- Re: spoofing the ethernet address (license managers) Forrest W. Christian (Mar 27)
- Re: spoofing the ethernet address (license managers) Eric Sherrill (Mar 29)
- Re: spoofing the ethernet address (license managers) Forrest W. Christian (Mar 29)
- Re: spoofing the ethernet address (license managers) Eric Sherrill (Mar 29)
- Explorer crashes when it sees this .lnk file Parity Error (Mar 28)
- Re: Explorer crashes when it sees this .lnk file Vladimir Dubrovin (Mar 29)
- Re: Explorer crashes when it sees this .lnk file Mike Furr (Mar 29)
- TCP Sequence Prediction Dean Michael Dorman (Mar 29)
- Re: TCP Sequence Prediction H D Moore (Mar 29)
- Re: TCP Sequence Prediction Seth R Arnold (Mar 29)
- Re: TCP Sequence Prediction Vladimir Dubrovin (Mar 30)
- Re: TCP Sequence Prediction Maxime Rousseau (Mar 30)
(Thread continues...)
- Re: spoofing the ethernet address (license managers) Forrest W. Christian (Mar 27)