Hi, I’m a newbie and I get involved in working on a very hard project, this is a I-l*ked system, version 5.24 with dongle… obviously it is a project over my little knowledge of reversing.
Let’s explain the project… it’s a very famous audio recording software that now runs on a very, very inexpensive sound cards, this software comes with different limitations to bypass:

1- The demo version is save and export disabled.
2- The full version needs an il*ok usb dongle to run (as a newbie I think this is a very hard approach).
3- Exist other version which runs on different hardware (the brand of the software), but I think that the cheap hardware will work bypassing the hardware check on startup.

The brand I’m talking is <I'm a moron>, and the software of course is <I didn't read the FAQ>.
The project files can be found here: <please flame me>
The demo can be downloaded from the <really hard> website
Ahhh, I forget to mention that all the three versions are limited to 32 audio tracks even if you buy it, lots of people might be frustrated because of it (a drum is usually 10 tracks).

What I’ve done:
Started the program and puff, softice is not allowed to be installed (this is the infamous service string search, then used Olly.
Now we have other problems, int3 exceptions, GetTickCount check, several exceptions must be returned to software from debugger and…. Noooo, it’s still unbeatable, so after 10 lost days I desist, for me the p*ce protection ¡l*k is unbeatable, and everything without running the dongle version, at the moment I’m still with the demo, (TIP: I know team H2O has defeated ¡l*k with some plugins <sigh>, so I know this protection has been defeated, they turn the free 8 audio track version into 128).
Then I tried other way, so dumped the process, started ida and what…. The strings are crypted… then I created a little app in C and without using the debugger enabled the save option in the demo version, just one problem… it launch the save dialog, but there’s no info on saved file(I’m pretty close, and without debugger)(it can be made a redirection to a .dll at runtime to add this functionality)… I need some help at this part…PLEASE
The other part, the tracks limit… as I used to do trainers freezed the DWORD where the remaining voices reside… ahaaa… this is very interesting, now there is no MessageBox telling that there is no available voices… but here I’ve got an error that can be seen in the strings section… is quite interesting. (I’m going this way…
So please, help with you infinite knowledge and… how a hell can I debug this app?

Thanks, RaX...

The only reason the thread was spared was because of effort in describing what has been done and other context details...

Ohhh.. I’m really sorry about it…
well... following the DWORD in the latest post and bypassing the error message I’ve found a string which belongs to a exception table several jumps before… there’s no other call to this point, and I know there are several functions which decrypt a part of the .data code and after execution they clear the executed code itself….

Using Olly to debug and bypass exceptions range from 0 to 0xFFFFFF is not the solution and the code is very obfuscated for a newbie… two more weeks and I will give up.

Please I accept some help…. (private or public) I’ve read some other info related to this protection, LiSa wrote some info about the t*p*d.sys, but I’m sure the protection becomes a little harder.

Thank you.

FoxB, thanks a lot for your help... with your question even when I'm working with a Il*k I've read an article about WIBU and now I can attach to the process with Olly without exceptions.... and hangs up, thank to Ricardo Narvaja too for his explanation on 0x0 to 0xffffff exceptions in Olly.

It makes the work easier, thanks.

P.D. hope you get better luck too with codemeter.

RaX

dongs

Wow Nice editation... Iam laughing....