HOW TO CRACK, by +ORC, A TUTORIAL

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Lesson 8.2: How to crack Windows, a deepr approach

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[SNAP95] [WINZIP] [WINCAT]

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SPECIAL NOTE: Please excuse the somehow "unshaven"

character of the windows lessons... I'm cracking the

newest Windows '95 applications right now, therefore

at times I had to add "on the fly" some corrections to

the older Windows 3.1 and Windows NT findings.

"homines, dum docent, discunt".

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-> 1st THING TO REMEMBER

If you thought that DOS was a mess, please notice that windows

3.1 is a ghastly chaos, and windows 95 a gruesome nightmare of

ill-cooked spaghetti code. Old Basic "GOTO" abominations were

quite elegant in comparison with this concoction... One thing is

sure: This OS will not last... it's way too messy organised,

impossible to consolidate, slow and neurotic (but I must warn

you... I thought exactly the same things about DOS in 1981).

The most striking thing about windows 95 is that it is neither

meat not fish: neither 16 nor 32... you could call it a "24 bit"

operating system.

We'll never damage Microsoft interests enough to compensate for

this moronic situation... where you have to wait three minutes

to get on screen a wordprocessor that older OS (and even old DOS)

kick up in 5 seconds. I decide therefore, hic et nunc, to add an

ADDENDUM to this tutorial: Addendum 1 will be dedicated to teach

everybody how to crack ALL Microsoft programs that do exist on

this planet. I'll write it this sommer and give it away between

the "allowed" lessons.

Anyway you can rely on good WINICE to crack everything, you'll

find it on the web for free, I use version 1.95, cracked by [The

Lexicon] (do not bother me for Warez, learn how to use the search

engines on the web and fish them out yourself). Learn how to use

this tool... read the whole manual! Resist the temptation to

crack immediatly everything in sight... you 'll regret pretty

soon that you did not wanted to learn how to use it properly.

A little tip: as Winice is intended more for software developers

than for crackers, we have to adapt it a little to our purposes,

in order to make it even more effective: a good idea is to have

in the *.DAT initialization file following lines:

INIT = "CODE ON; watchd es:di; watchd ds:si;"

TRA = 92

This way you'll always have the hexadecimal notation on, two very

useful watch windows for passwords deprotection and enough buffer

for your traces.

WINDOWS 3.1. basic cracking: [ALGEBRAIC PROTECTIONS]

The most used windows protections are "registration codes",

these must follow a special pattern: have a "-" or a "+" in a

predetermined position, have a particular number in particular

position... and so on.

For the program [SHEZ], for instance, the pattern is to have a

14 bytes long alphanumeric sequence containing CDCE1357 in the

first 8 bytes.

The second level of protection is to "connect" such a

pattern to the alphanumeric contents of the NAME of the user...

every user name will give a different "access key". This is the

most commonly used system.

As most of these protections have a "-" inside the answering

code, you do not need to go through the normal cracking procedure

(described in the next lesson):

* load WINICE

* hwnd [name_of_the_crackanda_module]

* choose the window Handle of the snap, i.e, the exact

"FIELD" where the code number input arrives... say 091C(2)

* BMSG 091C WM_GETTEXT

* Run anew

* Look at the memory location(s)

* Do the same for the "Username" input FIELD. (Sometimes

linked, sometimes not, does not change much, though)

* BPR (eventually with TRACE) on the memory locations (these

will be most of the time FOUR: two NUMBERCODES and two

USERNAMES). The two "mirrored" ones are the most important

for your crack. At times there will be a "5th" location,

where the algebraic play will go on...

* Look at the code that performs algebraic manipulations on

these locations and understand what it does...

* Disable the routine or jump over it, or reverse it, or

defeat it with your own code... there are thousand

possibilities...

* Reassemble everything.

Uff... quite a long cracking work just to crack some miserable

program... isn'there a quicker way? OF COURSE THERE IS! Actually

there are quite a lot of them (see also the crack of Wincat Pro

below): Look at the following code (taken from SNAP32, a screen

capture utility for Windows 95, that uses a pretty recent

protection scheme):

XOR EBX,EBX ; make sure EBX is zeroed

MOV BL, [ESI] ; load input char in BL

INC ESI ; point at the next character

MOV EDI,EBX ; save the input character in EDI

CMP EBX,+2D ; input char is a "-" ?

JZ ok_it's_a_+_or_a_-

CMP EBX,+2B ; input char is a "+" ?

JNZ Jesus_it's_neither_a_minus_nor_a_plus_let's_check_it

:ok_it's_a_+_or_a_-

XOR EBX,EBX ; EBX is zeroed

MOV BL,[ESI] ; recharge BL

INC ESI ; point to next char (do not check - or +)

:Jesus_it's_neither_a_minus_nor_a_plus_let's_check_it

XOR EBP,EBP ; zero EBP

CMP DWORD PTR [boguschecker], +01

...

even if you did not read all my precedent lessons, you do not

need much more explications... this is a part of the algebraic

check_procedure inside the SNAP32 module... you could also get

here through the usual

USER!BOZOSLIVEHERE

KERNEL!HMEMCPY

USER!GLOBALGETATOMNAME

Windows wretched and detestable APIs used for copy protections,

as usual with WINICE cracking, and as described elsewhere in my

tutorial.

The above code is the part of the routine that checks for the

presence of a "+" or a "-" inside the registration number (many

protections scheme requires them at a given position, other need

to jump over them).

Now sit down, make yourself comfortable and sip a good Martini-

Wodka (invariably very useful in order to crack... but be aware

that only Moskowskaia russian Wodka and a correct "Tumball" glass

will do, do not forget the lemon)... what does this "-" stuff

mean for us little crackers?

It means that we can search directly for the CMP EBX,+2B

sequence inside any file protected with these schemes... and

we'll land smack in the middle of the protection scheme! That's

amazing... but you will never underrate enough the commercial

programmers... the only really amazing thing is how simpleton the

protectionists are! You don't believe me? Try it... you 'll get

your crack at least 4 out of 5 times.

Yes I know, to find this code is not yet to crack it... but for

this kind of copy protection (that's the reason it is so

widespread) there is no single solution... each makes a slightly

different algebraic manipulation of the alphanumeric and of the

numeric data. It's up to you to crack the various schemes... here

you can only learn how to find them and circumvene them. I'll not

give you therefore a "debug" crack solution. You'll find it

yourself using my indications (see the crack of the Wincat Pro

program below).

WHERE ARE THE CODES? WHERE ARE THE MODIFIED FILES? WHERE DO THE

PROTECTIONS KEEP COUNT OF THE PASSING DAYS?

Most of the time the protection schemes use their own *.ini files

in the c:\WINDOWS directory for registration purposes... at time

they even use the "garbage sammler" win.ini file. Let's take as

example WINZIP (versions 5 and 5.5), a very widespread program,

you'll surely have one shareware copy of it somewhere between

your files.

In theory, winzip should be registered per post, in order to

get a "NEW" copy of it, a "registered" copy.

This scares most newby crackers, since if the copy you have

it's not full, there is no way to crack it and make it work,

unless you get the REAL stuff. The youngest among us do not

realize that the production of a real "downsized" demo copy is

a very expensive nightmare for the money-infatuated commercial

programmers, and that therefore almost nobody does it really...

nearly all "demos" and "trywares" are therefore CRIPPLED COMPLETE

PROGRAMS, and not "downsized" demos, independently of what the

programmers and the protectionists have written inside them.

Back to Winzip... all you need, to crack winzip, is to add a

few lines inside the win.ini file, under the heading [WinZip],

that has already been created with the demo version, before the

line with "version=5.0".

I will not help you any further with this... I'll leave it to

you to experiment with the correct sequences... inside win.ini

you must have following sequence (these are only template to

substitute for your tries inside WINICE... you'll get it, believe

me):

[WinZip]

name=Azert Qwerty

sn=########

version=5.5

The *important* thing is that this means that you DO NOT NEED

to have a "new registered version" shipped to you in order to

make it work, as the protectionist sellers would like you to

believe. The same applies most of the time... never believe what

you read in the read.me or in the registration files...

This brings me to a broader question: NEVER believe the

information they give you... never believe what television and/or

newspapers tell you... you can be sure that the only reason they

are notifying you something is to hinder you to read or

understand something else... this stupid_slaves_society can only

subsist if nobody thinks... if you are really interested in what

is going on, real information can be gathered, but surely not

through the "conventional" newspapers and/or news_agencies (and

definitely NEVER through television, that's really only for the

stupid slaves)... yes, some bit of information can be

(laboriously) gathered... it's a cracking work, though.

HOW TO CRACK INFORMATION [WHERE WHAT]

* INTERNET

In the middle of the hugest junk collection of the planet, some

real information can be laboriously gathered if you do learn how

to use well the search engines (or if you do build your ones...

my spiders are doing most of the work for me... get your robots

templates from "Harvest" or "Verify" and start your "spider

building" activity beginning from Martijn Koster's page). As

usual in our society, in the Internet the real point is exactly

the same point you'll have to confront all your life long: HOW

TO THROW AWAY TONS OF JUNK, HOW TO SECLUDE MYRIADS OF USELESS

INFORMATION and HOW TO FISH RARE USEFUL INFORMATION, a very

difficult art to learn per se. Internet offers some information,

though, mainly BECAUSE it's (still) unregulated. You want a

proof? You are reading it.

* SOME (RARE) NEWSPAPERS.

The newspaper of the real enemies, the economic powers that

rule this slaves world, are paradoxically most of the time the

only ones worth studying... somewhere even the real rulers have

to pass each other some bits of real information. The "Neue

Zuercher Zeitung", a newspaper of the Swiss industrials from

Zuerich, is possibly the best "not_conformist trend analyzer"

around that you can easily find (even on the web). These

swissuckers do not give a shit for ideology, nor preconcerted

petty ideas, the only thing they really want is to sell

everywhere their ubiquitous watches and their chocolates... in

order to do it, a land like Switzerland, with very high salaries

and a good (and expensive) social system, must use something

brilliant... they found it: a clear vision of the world... as a

consequence this newspaper is very often "against" the trend of

all the other medias in the world, the ones that are used only

in order to tame the slaves... If the only language you know is

english (poor guy) you could try your luck with the weekly

"Economist"... you'll have to work a lot with it, coz it has been

tailored for the "new riches" of the Tatcher disaster, but you

can (at times) fish something out of it... they do a lot of

idiotic propaganda, but are nevertheless compelled to write some

truth. American newspapers (at least the ones you can get here

in Europe) are absolute shit... one wonders where the hell do the

americans hyde the real information.

On the "non-capitalistic" side of information there is a

spanish newspaper "El Pais" that seems to know about what's going

on in South America, but it's so full of useless propaganda about

irrelevant Spanish politics that it's not really worth reading.

The monthly "Le Monde diplomatique" offers something too... this

one exaggerates a little on the pauperistic "third world" side,

but has a lot of useful information. See what you can do with all

this information (or disinformation?)

[BELIEVE THE COUNTRARY]

Another good rule of thumb in choosing your medias is the

following... if all medias around you assure, for instance, that

"the Serbians are evil"... the only logical consequence is that

the Serbians are not so evil at all and that "the Croats" or some

other Yugoslavian shits are the real culprits. This does not mean

at all that the Serbians are good, I warn you, it means only what

I say: something is surely hidden behind the concerted propaganda

you hear, the best reaction is to exaggerate in the other

direction and believe the few bit of information that do say the

countrary of the trend. This rule of thumb may be puerile, but

it works somehow most of the time... if somewhere everybody

writes that the commies are bad then THERE the commies must not

be so bad at all and, conversely, if everybody in another place

writes that the commies are all good and nice and perfect (like

the Soviet propaganda did) then THERE the commies are surely not

so good... it's a matter of perspective, much depends on where

you are, i.e. whose interests are really at stake. There is NEVER

real information in this society, only propaganda... if you still

do not believe me do yourself a little experiment... just read

the media description of a past event (say the Vietnam war) as

written AT THE MOMENT of the event and (say) as described 10

years later. You'll quickly realize how untrustworthy all

newspapers and medias are.

* SEMIOTICS You'll have to study it (as soon as you can) to

interpret what they let you believe, in order to get your

bearings. A passing knowledge of ancient RHETORIC can help quite

a lot. Rhetoric is the "Softice" debugger you need to read

through the propaganda medias: concentrate on Periphrasis,

Synecdoche, Antonomasia, Emphasis, Litotes and Hyperbole at the

beginning... you'll later crack higher with Annominatio,

Polyptoton, Isocolon and all the other lovely "figurae

sententiae".

Enough, back to software cracking.

HOW A REGISTRATION CODE WORKS [WINCAT]

Let's take as an example for the next crack, a Username-

algebraic registration code, WINCAT Pro, version 3.4., a 1994

shareware program by Mart Heubel. It's a good program, pretty

useful to catalogue the millions of files that you have on all

your cd-roms (and to find them when you need them).

The kind of protection Wincat Pro uses is the most utilized

around: the username string is manipulated with particular

algorithms, and the registration key will be made "ad hoc" and

depends on the name_string. It's a protection incredibly easy to

crack when you learn how the relevant procedures work.

[WINCAT Pro] is a good choice for cracking studies, coz you

can register "over your registration" one thousand times, and you

can herefore try for this crack different user_names to see all

the algebrical correspondences you may need to understand the

protection code.

In this program, when you select the option "register", you

get a window where you can input your name and your registration

number (that's what you would get, emailed, after registering

your copy). If you load winice and do your routinely hwnd to

individuate the nag window, and then breakpoint on the

appropriate memory ranges you'll peep in the working of the whole

bazaar (this is completely useless in order to crack these

schemes, but it'll teach you a lot for higher cracking, so you

better do it also with two or three other programs, even if it

is a little boring): a series of routines act on the input (the

name) of the user: the User_name_string (usn). First of all the

usn_length will be calculated (with a REPNZ SCASB and a following

STOSB). Then various routines store and move in memory the usn

and the registration_number (rn) and their relative lengths. In

order to compare their lengths and to check the correct

alphanumeric correspondence between usn and rn, the program first

uppercases the usn and strips all eventual spaces away.

Here the relevant code (when you see an instruction like

SUB AL,20 you should immediately realize that you are in a

uppercasing routine, which is important for us, since these are

mostly used for password comparisons)... here the relevant Winice

unassemble and my comments:

253F:00000260 AC LODSB <- get the usn chars

253F:00000261 08C0 OR AL,AL <- check if zero

253F:00000263 740F JZ 0274 <- 0: so usn finished

253F:00000265 3C61 CMP AL,61 <- x61 is "a", man

253F:00000267 72F7 JB 0260 <- not a lower, so loop

253F:00000269 3C7A CMP AL,7A <- x7A is "z", what else?

253F:0000026B 77F3 JA 0260 <- not a lower, so loop

253F:0000026D 2C20 SUB AL,20 <- upper it if it's lower

253F:0000026F 8844FF MOV [SI-01],AL<- and hyde it away

253F:00000272 EBEC JMP 0260 <- loop to next char

253F:00000274 93 XCHG AX,BX

...

The instruction MOV [SI-01],AL that you see here is important

at times, coz it points to the location of the "pre-digested"

usn, i.e. the usn formatted as it should be for the number

comparison that will happen later. In some more complicated

protection schemes the reasoning behind this formatting is the

following: "Stupid cracker will never get the relation algorhitm

usn <-> rn, coz he does not know that usn AND rn are slightly

changed before comparing, ah ah... no direct guessing is

possible". Here is only "polishing": you have to "polish" a

string before comparing it in order to concede some mistakes to

the legitimate user (too many spaces in the name, upper-lower

case mismatch, foreign accents in the name etc.) You just need

to know, for now, that this checking is usually still 5 or 6

calls ahead of the real checking (it's what we call a "green

light").

You should in general realize that the real checking of the

algebrical correspondence follows after a whole series of memory

operations, i.e.: cancelling (and erasing) the previous (if ever)

attempts; reduplicating the usn and the rn somewhere else in

memory; double checking the string lengths (and saving all these

values somewhere... be particularly attentive when you meet stack

pointers (for instance [BP+05]): most of the programs you'll find

have been written in C (what else?). C uses the stack (SS:SP) to

pass parameters or to create local variables for his procedures.

The passwords, in particular, are most of the time compared to

data contained within the stack. If inside a protection a BP

register points to the stack you have most of the time fished

something... remember it pupils: it will spare you hours of

useless cracking inside irrelevant routines. Back to our CATWIN:

another little check is about the "minimal" length allowed for

a user name, in our babe, for instance, the usn must have at

least 6 chars:

230F:00003483 3D0600 CMP AX,0006

230F:00003486 730F JAE 3497 <- go to nice_name

:too_short

230F:00003488 BF9245 MOV DI,4592 <- no good: short

After a lot of other winicing you'll finally come across

following section of the code:

2467:00000CA3 B90100 MOV CX,0001

2467:00000CA6 03F1 ADD SI,CX

2467:00000CA8 2BC1 SUB AX,CX

2467:00000CAA 7213 JB 0CBF

2467:00000CAC 40 INC AX

2467:00000CAD 368B4F04 MOV CX,SS:[BX+04] <- here

2467:00000CB1 0BC9 0R CX,CX

2467:00000CB3 7D02 JGE 0CB7

2467:00000CB5 33C9 XOR CX,CX

2467:00000CB7 3BC1 CMP AX,CX

2467:00000CB9 7606 JBE 0CC1

2467:00000CBB 8BC1 MOV AX,CX

2467:00000CBD EB02 JMP 0CC1

2467:00000CBF 33C0 XOR AX,AX

2467:00000CC1 AA STOSB <- and here

2467:00000CC2 8BC8 MOV CX,AX

2467:00000CC4 F3A4 REPZ MOVSB <- and here!

2467:00000CC6 8EDA MOV DS,DX

2467:00000CC8 FC RETF 0008

This is obviously the last part of the checking routine

(I'll not delve here with the mathematical tampering of it, if

you want to check its workings, by all means, go ahead, it's

quite interesting, albeit such study is NOT necessary to crack

these schemes). The important lines are obviously the MOV

CX,SS:[BX+04], the STOSB and the REPZ MOVSB (as usual in password

protection schemes, you do remember lesson 3, don't you?).

You should be enough crack-able :=) by now (if you have read

all the precedent lessons of my tutorial), to find out easily,

with these hints, how the working of the protection goes and

where dwells in memory the ECHO of the correct rn (passkey) that

matches the name you typed in. Remember that in these kind of

cracks the ECHO is present somewhere (90% of the cases). There

are obviously one thousand way to find such ECHOs directly,

without going through the verificayions routines... for instance

you could also find them with a couple of well placed

snap_compares, it's a "5 minutes" cracking, once you get the

working of it. I leave you to find, as interesting exercise, the

routine that checks for a "-" inside the rn, a very common

protection element.

In order to help you understand the working of the protection

code in [Wincat Pro] I'll give you another hint, though: if you

type "+ORC+ORC+ORC" as usn, you'll have to type 38108-37864 as

rn, if you usn as usn "+ORC+ORC" then the relative rn will be

14055-87593. But these are my personal cracks... I have offered

this information only to let you better explore the mathematical

tampering of this specific program... you'll better see the

snapping mechanism trying them out (going through the routines

inside Winice) alternatively with a correct and with a false

password. Do not crack Wincat with my combination! If you use a

different usn than your own name to crack a program you only show

that you are a miserable lamer... no better than the lamers that

believe to "crack" software using huge lists of serial numbers...

that is really software that they have stolen (Yeah: stolen, not

cracked). You should crack your programs, not steal them...

"Warez_kids" and "serial#_aficionados" are only useless zombies.

I bomb them as soon as I spot them. YOU ARE (gonna be) A CRACKER!

It makes a lot of a difference, believe me.

Well, that's it for this lesson, reader. Not all lessons of my

tutorial are on the Web.

You 'll obtain the missing lessons IF AND ONLY IF you mail

me back (via anon.penet.fi) with some tricks of the trade I may

not know that YOU discovered. Mostly I'll actually know them

already, but if they are really new you'll be given full credit,

and even if they are not, should I judge that you "rediscovered"

them with your work, or that you actually did good work on them,

I'll send you the remaining lessons nevertheless. Your

suggestions and critics on the whole crap I wrote are also

welcomed.

"If you give a man a crack he'll be hungry again

tomorrow, but if you teach him how to crack, he'll

never be hungry again"

E-mail +ORC

an526164@anon.penet.fi