Re: Business models

[Mads Bondo Dydensborg <madsdyd@challenge.dk>]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, Steve Baker wrote:

> > There is nothing wrong with changing an executable with e.g. sed.

As Steve pointed out, you need to make sure the string lenghts are the
same, and if you use some kind of package format, like deb, rpm, tgz, this
may complicate matters some.

> > 
> > It is very ugly, yes, but it does work.
> > 
> > The qkhack for Quake worked in this way. It changed the name of some
> > libraries, thereby changing quake's mouse and keyboard input from using
> > svgalib to using X. (With a bit of wrapper code in a special dll).
> > 
> > However, as someone pointed out, it is as easy for the downloader to
> > change the binary back - if he can find the code in the binary, that is.
> 
> You can fix that.
> 
> He'll easily find out where you placed the date code in the binary - just
> download two copies on different days and look to see which bytes are
> different.

Clever.

Everyone interessted in this kind of protection, should visit:

http://www.instinct.org/fravia/

apart from beeing a cracker site (and quite ugly) it actually contains a
couple of articles on how to protect your software. At least 

http://www.instinct.org/fravia/protec.htm

should be interessting. Lots of the information is about DOS and Windows,
but they do have a Linux section, and in any case, the methods are
similar. The case stories are quite interessting. 

Mads

-- 
Mads Bondo Dydensborg.                               madsdyd@challenge.dk
The IETF has an interesting enough life as is getting the "too simple" 
protocols to work sanely, hardware/software providers and sysadmins have a hard
time understanding, implementing and exploiting the "too simple" stuff today.
I.e., imagine MS-mess but on Internet scale, not just desktop-scale. If you
can. ... Scary. Real scary. Halloween stuff, definitely.
                                        - Dr. Horst H. von Brand


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