Programmer's corner

An incredibly stupid "commercial" Protection
06 September 1998

by LSD
(slightly edited by fravia+)

---

Courtesy of fravia's pages of reverse engineering

**Title: An incredibly stupid "commercial" Protection: 
         (4 Very Stupid Programmers)

**SubTitle: Another Ready-Made Protection Suck!
**Writer  : Lsd     Email: LSD-LSD.USA.NET

**INTRODUCTION:
Plz, excuse my very bad English 'coz i'm an Italian boy (da Cesenatico 
un "Forza Pantani!")
I will show, how to crack a stupid Ready-Made commercial protection scheme:
SoftSentry 2.07 of the 20/20 Software. Download the Full Trial (very 
easily crackable) version at www.twenty.com.
This software allows zombie-programmers (IMHO does not deserve to be called 
"programmer" somebody that has fallen for this bogus protection), to  easyly 
'automagically' transform their FULL program in a Trial/Demo version. Sounds 
like a snakeoil vendor uh? It is exactly that: bogus commùercialism at his 
best, as usual when they do something for money.

This is what they say: read yhe following and open your mouth in awe:
...softSENTRY 2 allows people who develop and market software to increase their 
sales by cutting down on unlicensed use of their software and by making it 
easy to provide effective trial versions that let prospects try out the products 
for a limited period. 
SoftSENTRY offers a range of software protection and trialware options to fit a 
variety of needs.
How softSENTRY is used?
The softSENTRY product is currently sold in three models: softSENTRY, softSENTRY 
Lite 16 and softSENTRY Lite 32. They all work alike, but the Lite versions do not 
have all the capabilities of the full version. (See Feature Summary for differences 
between the models.) 
When started, the main softSENTRY program is displayed, allowing you to select 
the types of limitations that are to be applied and what forms are to be displayed. 
When the appropriate Edit buttons are clicked, softSENTRY's Form Editor is invoked 
allowing the text, buttons and edit boxes on the forms to be visually created and 
arranged. Clicking the "Build .EXE" button and selecting a target Windows executable 
file will let you produce a protected copy of that file. 
Clicking the "Build .DLL" button will create a dynamic link library file which can 
be called from your program. (Use of a .dll is required for .exe files created with 
certain development systems. See Reference for more detail.) Each combination of 
limitation definitions and forms is saved as a softSENTRY project that can be 
reopened in softSENTRY for future use.
Absolutely No Programming Necessary (sic!)
You can protect your completed application or create fully-functional "trialware" 
without the need to modify your product's source code in any way. SoftSENTRY works 
directly on your 16 or 32 bit Windows .EXE files. Plus, softSENTRY lets you specify 
the protection methods and forms to be displayed working solely with selection boxes 
and visual layout tools.
....[and more]..


**ToolZ: 
Soft-Ice 3.x
an Hex Editor
SoftSentry 2.007 Trial Version (www.twenty.com)

**Essay:
Let's go.. Download the demo program at www.twenty.com
I will not show how to crack this demo, 'coz it is not interesting, and it's incredibly 
easy to do (Do it youself! Tip: delete C:\windows\system\ss.drv and the "magicKey" 
located in  HkCLassRoot\{XXXXXXXXXX} to restore the trial period) but i will show how 
to kill its protection schemes (ANY kind!)
(BTW: the fact that the protection of the supposed protecting application is so 
easy to crack says a lot about the quality of the product itself :-)

Ok, now you will have to use your target: protect some small file, in order to 
disassemble the process and watch how SoftSentry does work.
For disassemble we will use SoftIce, 'coz Wdasm89 seem to crash when we try to 
load this target.
The Protected file, and the original file have a different size. Good, you'll 
probably expect, as I did, some encryption and variable random protection scheme 
inside the target. You'r in for a surprise.

Now hold your breath: this is the entry point for ALL PROTECTED FILES:

:004B066F CC             int    03
:004B0670 55             push   ebp     ; 




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