The main idea is to let *known* users discuss about this topic, without fearing alexey's visits to leach about our recent findings.
btw asprotect 1.2 has already changed, the oep are not reached the same way than before.
thanks for your comments.

+Tsehp

Good idea my friend. The developers don't help us by telling us what they did to protect, so there should be no reason that they know how we overcome their
protections.
The problem would be to set up trust for new users. You can never know if some
cracker is not a protector incognito hehe

LS

I don't visit here often, but as far as a special forum for a special protection, get with the program. I don't want to sound high and mighty, but what was the reason for THIS forum in the first place? Was it so only crackers could share knowledge? If that was the case, I must have missed the signup sheet because I can't remember any such rule. I say share what you know or keep your mouth shut. If he learns from us - good. What would you be if he never updated again? Just another guy on a forum offering advice or some super-duper stud? So what if he visits here.. let him learn. Maybe in the next version he'll throw you something so wild that you won't be able to figure it out, now wouldn't THAT be fun! Just my 2 cents worth. Keep it all free for EVERYONE!

joe

Keeping it all free for everyone will still be the ideas of those forums,
but asprotect is a different case, just imagine that you built a tool or a program that costed you a lot of working hours, that's the case with usual iat rebuilders that were made before like the famous r!isc ones or my recent tools.
Well Alexey uses to get info from our forums, and changes only some parts of his code, without inventing anything new, but enough for those programs to fail. He plays on the 2-3 weeks time between his new version, and the corresponding un protector that will follow, urging all his clients to update because the previous version is cracked.
Do you think that all those working hard reversers still share what they
found here ? It's wrong, I get a lot of personal e-mails about this topic, so the idea is to encourage those people to still share their knowledge, but this time not to make this guy win some bucks with all our work.
The idea only concerns asprotect, the rest will still be free and available to everyone, as long as the other protections schemes seems to evoluate just by the original ideas of their programmers.

Hi,
its a great idea to create a private asprotect forum. I think its not fair that Alexey earns money with our knowledge, so he can use his brain to improve asprotect.
Alexey has an easy game here, he looks at this forum and knows the weak points of asprotect. We should make the game for him a little bit harder.

AdamA

.....something I have said for months........and no-one would believe. But I'm happy some ppl have come to the same insight.

Btw, it is not so easy to put the Asprotect discussion in private. You know, there are hundred ways for the protector to infiltrate in the cracking/reversing scene and to get his knowledge.
Also, on what basis will you (tsehp) accept someone asking for new info on Asprotect and/or ReVirgin? People you know...yes...but it shouldn't be so hard for Alexey to act like me, BlackB. Well, the only reference are the emailadresses.
But still, it won't be easy to keep it private.

greets

BlackB

Here is a snippet fro the ASprotect help file :-


QUOTE
=====
" All authors of protection tools state that their one is the best, so whom to believe? How can I be sure it is not just a regular trickery?

When you choose a protection, don't listen to authors - no programmer will confess his product is bad, or he/she may simply be mistaken apropos of his protections. You'd better consult your colleagues who already use this protection (e.g. meet them at forums); ask more competent programmers in the sphere of Software Protection to analyze your protection. If your previous protection was cracked and you have e-mail of the cracker, ask him to test your new protection. There's no doubt it would be interesting to him.

Our Protection Team will perform testing of your protection, point out its drawbacks, and advise changing or improving the protection. Contact the Protection Team...... "
UNQUOTE
=======

So I guess we are the the 'Team' :-D

I don't think a private forum will succeed. Yes, you can get some extra info about the visitor and try and 'validate' him
but hell, If I go to an Internet Cafe in any major City my ID will
be different.So a private e-mail group is feasable..... But for me this is a fun thing. I am hooked on 'reversing' - erm cracking and I can see the sad day when it will be too dangerous to be so open on the net as we are right now. Back to just DL targets and playing by myself }> or reversing shareware from Magazine CD's. I reverse hundreds of targets a year. How many do I keep ?..... about 5 programs in 5 years !!! The rest are just discarded as useless bloated crap. I keep lever arch files of SI screendumps and notes for reference.

I have only been really 'public' for the last year. I try to be careful, but still some people find I am in Canada or whatever.

So, my point of view is this, we are destroying some companies business model by reversing for FREE. BUT we also
ADD VALUE to the protector cos he learns. Just look at the development of ASprotect. Find some tuts from 2 years ago and it was friggin LAME, by today's standard. Cutting edge at the time. He has worked hard to improve his protection and actively pursues perfection. We take up the challenge by reversing lame software like 'TagRename' for fun.
I want him to earn money and survive and improve, else I have no fun and have to switch off my 2 PC's and revert to discuss the size of my Pirelli tyres and how many 'pints' I can drink in an hour and the size of that girls tits.......blah blah blah.

Long live the reverser/protector game

SplAj

Tsehp :

Tell me... why asprotect is a so different case ? I see no difference between this one and Safedisc, VOB, securom, softlocx or whatever. You spent lots of time and poor Alexei broke your job with an update ? Dang How unfair . Conceptually, if he break ur method very fast and easily, this is may be because ur solution is too trivial. Hiding ur discussions won't help if at the end u publicly release tool or whatever. And I am pretty sure u will or someone else will do so. U wanna own asprotect (or whatever) ? Design secrets weapons and never release them.

U are blinded by the fact u want to be recognized and hope to break for good ASProtect... Wake up, he will never give up (after all this is his business .

Cheers,

Well, I would hope Alexey would not give up,
else what would differentiate his product
from others He is providing quality support
to the people that bought his product. Of
course, the fact that the versions of asprotect
up till now have been broken suggests that
any program protected up till now with asprotect could be
deprotected and converted into warez by
skilled crackers, so maybe purchasing a generic
protector might not be such a good idea,
not to mention the additional memory requirement
of multiple occurrences of packed programs.

Even tho I understand your point, +tsehp, I do NOT feel a private forum is a good idea. The main idea of our reversing is to learn. This would hurt that idea. Trying to validate users would become a horrible task and if Alexy could get a friend to get inside - he has the info. I see it as an ongoing battle between Alexey and the reversing community. Somewhere down the line, the cycle will break. The cost of additional changes to develop an uncrackable protection will become to much. Let's face it, other than government and high $$ financial areas that use very expen$ive encryption, etc - the average protection has been designed to stop the casual user from easily cracking it. There will always be people who want the challenge and have the time to spend hours/days cracking a certain protection. I think Asp will reach a point of no return where further development will be useless for it's targeted market. Also, if I were a customer of his and I kept getting updates because the protection had been cracked, I'd begin to look for another method.

vgb

This was always going to be a controversial thread ;-)

For what its worth, I agree with JosephCo and Splaj on this one. Alexei studies hard just as we do ourselves. We choose to reverse for fun, he chooses to apply his knowledge and pay his bills. I dont personally have a problem with that.

So each AsProtect version doesnt really change dramatically. Will keeping info secret fix this in any way ? IMHO, I dont think so.
Whereas if info is kept open and free to all, he may eventually decide to make a radical change, like joco says. Or who knows, someone else will learn him Alexei's methods, take it a major stage further, and produce another interesting protection.

I dont think anyone can deny that whatever your opinion, AsProtect has been quite a hot topic in the reversing community recently. Good. It makes a change. Let him earn his bucks, he is the one who had the initiative to use his (and undeniably) a lot of other peoples knowledge to produce something worthwhile.

Finally, I think a choice has to be made. Is the ultimate aim to be able to unwrap and crack all AsProtected applications, period?
Or do we want to eventually see progress in protection, want to be challenged, be forced to think like we all were in past days.

I was personally hoping the HCU-like elitism and hidden knowledge had been swept away for good. Well, lets see.

Regards

Carpathia

I'm not dreaming, he will surely get at least the info provided on this
private forum, but he's got to be approved by the actual people
that could access the forum, registered accounts with sufficient level.
But did you noticed something ? datarescue now spreads ida non gui,
softice is almost not updated and all those great tools will soon be outlawed on 2002 as fravia told me recently on our last meeting.
I don't personally think an open site or board will last forever and if we want to still share our knowledge, inner circles could be built.
I don't pay attention if he wins or not money, I just believe that at a certain level, good reversers stops to share what they discovered and only shares this knowledge with their friends or trusty people, so my idea was to make an attempt for those people to share what they know more easily.
Imagine you created a tool, and you know that at your level of programming, this could be easily defeated by an army of professional protectionnists, will you send them your sources telling them : hey, look what I've built, you can defeat this easily if you do this etc...
I just want to act the way they do : let the most important info, be shared with people that understands it and are trusty without only using e-mails, we could maybe gain a lot info if this kind of forums work.
But this isn't my decision, it is yours and actually my idea is far to have everyone's credits
later,

+Tsehp

heya +Tsehp,

Care to ellaborate on those points ? It's news to me..

LS

Hiya +Tsehp (nice job on Revirgin btw),

I'll be brief with my post. Consider the following :-

1. Alexey has many scene friends, I think you'd have a hard job filtering them out or blanking out any information you might try and hide on the 'other side'. Like any decent protectionist he's clued up and heals his software each time it gets breached, the conclusion can only be that a private forum would not work, regardless of all this 'free information' stuff I've seen flying about.

2. I like what G-Rom said, albeit rather tersely ;-), the problem with most of the unpackers and tools is their specific nature, it is this problem that allows Alexey and protectionists in general to make minor changes and break tools completely, you spend the next however many weeks finding out about the break / fixing your tool and bam! he does the same again, ad infinitum (and I really know how you feel ;-) ).

So the challenge isn't one for Alexey, its for you/the reversing scene, to develop better ways so that he can't keep making these trivial changes ;-).

My 2c and some.

Regards

CrackZ.

crackz, you have a point here, sure even if the forum is restricted, the
info will be known, even if it's delayed. So this closes the topic to me and forward me to maintain revirgin to always be up to date against
asprotect and other schemes also.

crackz, did you set up a new site ? if so, send me the link for me to add at the bottow of those pages.

regards,

+Tsehp

Well, I don't think they did that because of for us crackers They really don't like crackers @ Datarescue.....or, they certainly don't like me. hehe.
Just check the ida general forum.
And they aren't really convinced themselves that IDA will be prohibited.

well....nothing more to tell.....

regards,

BlackB

Well, I don't think they did that because of for us crackers They really don't like crackers @ Datarescue.....or, they certainly don't like me. hehe.
Just check the ida general forum.
And they aren't really convinced themselves that IDA will be prohibited.

well....nothing more to tell.....

regards,

BlackB

Mr BlackB:

Well u should have known that datarescue doesn't like crackers... after all IDA was released several times... now think a bit and how would u react towards crackers if the works of ur life was spreaded for free ? I am pretty sure u would be upset.

Speaking about prohibition of tools, ur remark is a bit stupid since u need a debugger to develop ur software and eventually a disassembler (btw adding some printf blabla inside ur code could be assimilated to be a debugger). More generally if i follow you, compilers should be prohibited .. after that's what is needed to create tools . How on earth would u justify that those tools are prohibited ? It would kill software engineering business. And I doubt governments would like to have all I.T. companies against their ass. Anyway we will have to wait and see about this.

Mr Tsehp :

Welcome to the reality . Improving ur methods is the only way to go. The more technical and abstracted (from a particular scheme)they are, the more difficult they will be to fuckup. Now speaking about knowledge sharing, creating a such board wouldn't have helped imho. It is a question of trust... Personnaly i wouldn't trust people from a board... not for sharing "secrets" techniques or tricks.

Cheers,

Since when did crackers start to copyright they'r knowledge , i thought we where the ones deprotectiong intellectual property, and not protection our own knowledge. As far as i concern, all knowledge about protections should be spread, this helps the new reversers to learn. The reason for why people want an inner circle is as far as i concert just to make themself feel special, we we're/are all newbies once, we appreciated the help we got then, and we should repay that be spreading our work.

So what if protectionists learn from us?
They have the right to protect their property as good as they can
And even make money on their own products hehe.

Regards,
Cast

Excuse me but do you think such a msgboard, archive site, links all all the work to update this is meant to build a secret place for us to feel special ? I'd like you to think a little and not to deviate what I first meant by protecting some ideas against software protectors, thats all pal.

The more difficult they will be to fuckup, the most chances we've got is to team and focus on a difficult target, so the idea could stay and create a open public asprotect forum, the topic comes a lot on the rce msgboard, so much that people searching the web for asprotect to lock their lastest program will land on this msgboard instead of aspack site