My old man vs LC Standalone

[Bob Sneidar]

I'd be curious to know how well simply pass protecting the stacks does. Given the "hacker" doesn't know the key that was used for the encryption, it shouldn't be possible. 

Bob S


> On Oct 22, 2019, at 07:46 , Tom Glod via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> JB, of course thats true, its just a matter of how long it takes and how
> skilled the cracker must be.  Its definitely not a reason not to try.
> 
> Kee, that sounds like quite the scheme.... a self-destructing stack.  My
> initial instinct is to create some trap using hashing also.
> 
> Thanks. :)
> 
> On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 11:03 PM kee nethery via use-livecode <
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
>> My wife built a Hypercard stack standalone that was protected by a dongle.
>> But, every call to the dongle was something you could search for in the
>> scripts. So she had scripts that did hashes of the scripts that talked to
>> the dongle. And she had scripts that did hashes of the scripts that checked
>> the hashes of the scripts …
>> 
>> Plus, she broke up the calculations into various sections of other code.
>> When a script noticed stuff was being altered, it would start erasing stuff
>> in the app stack. And it would look for Hypercard itself on their disk and
>> start erasing stuff in it. It would hold on as long as possible doing as
>> much damage as possible.
>> 
>> Setting the code to do all this protection was a carefully scripted
>> process because one false step and it would self destruct and damage her
>> Hypercard. It was pretty obvious to me when that happened because the
>> cursing would be rather loud and prolonged.
>> 
>> She’d do things like add up all the chars in a script, do a modulo on that
>> number, and then go to script ID <that answer> to execute a line of code in
>> that script.
>> 
>> I’m sure someone could have eventually gotten past all that stuff but
>> don’t think anyone ever did.
>> 
>> ------
>> 
>> All that said, shareware authors would routinely hang out on crack sites
>> and seconds before releasing their app, they would post a crack. No one
>> wants to be the second person to crack an app so the author would be the
>> only crack. That crack would allow someone to use the app for some period
>> of time (months) and then it would develop some kind of error. Users would
>> call in for support on XYZ error and the answer was, the more recent
>> version fixes that. It’s a simple upgrade, here’s the URL for users with
>> this error. And those folks would become paid users.
>> 
>> Kee