Are these any different to crack than .exe's that require a username and reg key? I have seen tutorials for making keygen's that the .exe requires a username and pass, but of course these tutorials were for certain programs and i'm not sure how to relate the info over into my own. Any advice? Links for help? (I did search for info first)

I hear JMI stompimg slowly in this direction - apparently you didn't search very well - sure you can find general descriptions of reversing, but actual targets are used for most tut's in order for you to see how the process works - it's up to you to learn, read some, learn some more, read more - ad infinitum, there is no end to the road when it comes to learning to reverse code. The bottom of this page is a good spot as is Lena's series for beginners which can be found at:


http://www.tuts4you.com ("http://www.tuts4you.com")

Your turn JMI

SiGiNT

I love a challenge!

Let me put it this simply. You will never learn how to effectively become a reverse engineer until you stop being too damn lazy to do the work necessary to learn the craft. Learning the craft is not a simple nor a quick process which is derived from short-cuts. It is achieved by actually spending the time necessary to learn how things actually work and how things are taken apart and analyzed by the various tools that are available for the task at hand.

Learning how to follow a tutorial may provide some immediate gratification, but it generally does not provide actual knowledge about the WHY things worked as they did. In other words, you are only learning HOW TO FOLLOW A TUTORIAL, instead of attempting to learn how protection systems and code might actually work. There simply is NO SUBSTITUTE for taking the time to learn the underlying materials necessary to understand what one sees actually happening when examining the program with the appropriate tools.

We have no knowledge of your skill set, except you appear to lack one or both of the two primary skills necessary for a successful reverse engineer. The first is a determination to learn whatever is necessary and a determination to follow through until the program is whipped into the desired result. The second, which is a corollary of the first, is the determination to go find for one's self whatever information may be available on the net about the subject matter one had decided to take on as the immediate challenge. In other words, learning how to find information on the net.

The original founder of these Forums has an entire website devoted to this pursuit of information. It is linked at the bottom of these pages and is called searchlores.

You have chosen the lazybutt approach, which is to ask someone else to take you by the hand and LEAD you to the source of more information, which you are apparently not willing to invest the time and energy, yourself, to learn how to find, let alone understand.

If this Reply seems harsh to you, it is again simply evidence that you have failed both to READ OUR FRIGGEN FAQ or to read much of anything on these Forums, or you would ALREADY KNOW that your question is either inappropriately framed, or inappropriately asked, or both.

Now if YOU want to become a reverse engineer, YOU should go forth and seek out the information YOU want, study it as much as you can and THEN come back with a question that shows that you have actually invested both some substantial personal effort and some careful consideration of what you understand and what you don't understand. This would look a whole lot more like a thoughtful question, rather than the winning of someone who whats the answers to their personal quest handed to them on a silver platter through the efforts of someone else.

Regards,

Lol I actually did read the FAQ fyi. I'll check those links some more for info. Thanks for the stop in, sorry for the bother.

Trying to set you on the correct path is not a "bother."

The point here is expressed in a simple tutorial on "writing keygens" which, by the way, was the first link I got when I put "writing keygens" into google:

Construction of keygenerators ( a step by step tutorial )
For beginners:

"One thing I cannot emphasize enough, to build keygens you must always understand COMPLETELY the protection of your target.
Little bits of code in a target may seem insignificant during run-time but they may have an enormous effect on the end code.
Then you have to reproduce what the program does to the data you enter to make a keygen."

The issue is not whether or not the program asks for a username and serial.

The issue is "HOW DOES YOUR TARGET VALIDATE WHATEVER INFORMATION IT ASKS FOR IS THE CORRECT INFORMATION" so that you get to the "goodboy" point where it starts the software with full functionality?

In order to know that, you have to understand what the software programmer is looking to check and, to get to see that, often times you have to figure out how the heck the programmer is attempting to prevent YOU from seeing the code with the available tools, so YOU can't figure it out too easily. If you don't know how to prevent the programmer from blowing up your tools (i.e. anti-debugging, anti-disassembly tricks) you will never even get to see the significant parts of the code and if you don't understand what the code is doing with the information, you will not be able to figure out how to "fix" it.

Regards,

Ok well I looked at some info but I have a different problem...whenever I try to load the .exe file into Olly to debug it Olly gives me the "not a valid pe file" error. What is this about??

The program i'm trying to debug was made in '97 btw

Once again you are trying to simply ask someone else to solve YOUR problem instead of attempting to solve YOUR problem yourself.

Have you troubled yourself to actually look up and read any information on pe file formats and headers and/or things which can be done to muck with the pe header to prevent opening a file with a debugger???

If the program was written in 1997, is it a DOS program, a windows program, or some other system program? What have YOU done to research the file, itself? Have you even looked for any information on the net about "cracking" this particular program? How would we know from what little you have provided ????

If the program runs, but will not open with the debugger, it is a safe bet they did something to the pe header. Have you done any reading here or searching on the net for anti-debugging tricks? How about a search for:

pe header + anti-debugging


I got 585 hits with some pretty interesting titles and other variations of such terms produce more hits.

Have you bothered to look at the PE Header with any tools and do you understand what the PE Header should contain and how the entries relate and what they mean???

Or are you just pretending to be interested in reversing and want someone to crack this puppy for you???

Regards,

Oh no I wanna crack this S.O.B. myself, it's been the piss in my coffee.

It isn't a dos program, it is a 2d RPG shareware/freeware. I have looked all over google and such sites for cracking and keygens for it with no luck.

I'll look at the pe header stuff again, I searched for the olly dbg problem before and found one thread but that was a guy who made his own .exe so that didn't really help me.

Or is it even a PE file at all? Use your Brain and figure it out. There's a huge amount of information waiting for you on the Internet. Go forth and find it.

Heh!

Me thinks JMI must have DEFINITELY graduated from London College of Advanced English... I don't need Rosetta Stone or Pimsleur. I need JMI. JMI, I bow before your superior command of the English language. HAIL!

Hetman, I am very happy you started out with a DOS/16-bit program. Its simple and you don't have TOO many tricks. Having said that, understand that MOST of the TOOLS today, are only for PE files (read that up at microsoft.com ) Ollydbg is, in my opinion, a rather unwieldly product. It may be good to start of by learning with older versions of SoftICE. You'll find them ALL around the web. The faster you learn to break a program by reading disassembly, the better it is. Debuggers are to be used sparingly.

Having said that, leave Olly for now. You can try and get SoftICE for DOS or SoftICE for 16/32 bits (search the tools or google). Try breaking your prgram that way.

A simple thing to remember is that you have a tool that is so powerful, it dwarfs even IDA PRO (good disassembler btw, you should try it, it disassembles 16 bit and DOS COM files also) and SOFTICE and all other tools. Its called a brain. Using a tool will NOT crack the software. Thinking how it works and where to break it does. So if you've never cracked before, try working FIRST with Winzip v6 and MIRC 3/4/5.

Have Phun