Crackproof Your Software: Protect Your Software Against Crackers (With CD-ROM)

Rating:
Summary: Great Information For Programmers
Review: As fast as developers and vendors can pump out new software the crackers of the world break the protection schemes. Rather than paying a fair price for the software many people visit underground cracker sites and warez FTP sites to download illegally cracked versions of software.

This theft has a financial impact on the vendors and developers. Large companies like Microsoft lose tens of millions of dollars in revenue to pirated and illegally distributed software each year. Not that they are in the market of not making money, but losing $30 or $50 million is more or less a drop in the bucket to Microsoft and something they can absorb as the cost of doing business and simply write it off on their taxes. Joe Programmer sitting in his basement writing code 18 hours a day to create a fantastic new shareware program however might miss the money a little more.

If you are a freelance software developer or even a small software company this book may be just what you're looking for. Crackproof Your Software: Protect Your Software Against Crackers gives you the inside scoop on the techniques and tools used by crackers to break into your software.

Pavol Cerven helps the reader to understand the common errors developers make that make it easier for crackers to break in and shows a number of tips and hints to help the reader learn how to write crackproof code including how to thwart attempts to debug or disassemble the code.

I highly recommend this book for software developers.

Tony Bradley is a consultant and writer with a focus on network security, antivirus and incident response. He is the About.com Guide for Internet / Network Security (http://netsecurity.about.com), providing a broad range of information security tips, advice, reviews and information. Tony also contributes frequently to other industry publications. For a complete list of his freelance contributions you can visit Essential Computer Security (http://www.tonybradley.com).

Rating:
Summary: Good overview of cracking prevention
Review: Before I read this book I knew very little about cracking software. After reading this book I still know very little. I agree with the author when he says that to protect yourself, you need a good understanding of what you're up against. It also helps when you apply a protection method if you can check it against something. The book falls way short of teaching you ways to crack software.

However, I gave this book a good rating because I think it does a good job of giving the reader an overview of methods he can use against crackers. It covers disassembly detection, registration protection, use of dongles, CD copy protection, and compressing and encoding executables. It also provides a CD with several freeware/shareware programs you can use to protect your software. Keep in mind that the book deals exclusively with the Windows operating system.

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Summary: Addressing issues specific to shareware programmers
Review: Crackproof Your Software: The Best Ways To Protect Your Software Against Crackers by software expert and programmer Pavol Cerven is a solid and impressively written guide to a profusion of tips, tricks, and techniques programmers can use to protect their software against hackers, vandals, and unscrupulous crackers who try to take programs apart and figure how they work for the purpose of avoiding paying money to copy, use, or distribute them. Addressing issues specific to shareware programmers, programming for Windows, and much more, Crackproof Your Software is a solid information source which is especially recommended for commercial software programmers and entrepreneurs. An included is an accompanying CD offering dozens of compression and encoding programs, debuggers, anti-debugging tricks, practical demonstrations, as well as sample code from the text.

Rating:
Summary: A very good start in the subject
Review: Definetely, a must have if you want to write shareware. It's a pretty complete survey of methods and programs to protect your work.
I'd also want to point out the following:
1) I miss some crackmes in the companion CD.
2) In a next edition, that I hope gets released soon, It should include information specifically devoted to Windows XP and stuff. The section on softice might be too large in the current edition.
Let me insist, a must have.
Hope this help.

Rating:
Summary: Good overview on software protection
Review: Go and get this book if you're a shareware programmer. It includes a huge list of protection mechanisms, lots of information on available (commercial and shareware) software protection systems, a CD Rom with lots of protection related stuff.

It's definitely worth the money and interesting for both programmers or people just interested in software protection.

Let's hope the author will continue his work and come up with a 2nd edition soon.

Rating:
Summary: More of a FAQ than educational
Review: I enjoyed reading Crackproof your software, and actually read through it in one sitting. I found that too many of the actual code samples were limited to windows 9x only. Given the Oct 2002 publishing date (more than a year after the release of XP) I would have expected (and appreciated) more XP centric code samples. It also would have perhaps been better if the tricks and tips were seperately described for each OS. I'd recommend this to anyone looking to keep their software off the 0-day warez boards.

Rating:
Summary: A little dated, 2nd ed. requested!
Review: I enjoyed reading Crackproof your software, and actually read through it in one sitting. I found that too many of the actual code samples were limited to windows 9x only. Given the Oct 2002 publishing date (more than a year after the release of XP) I would have expected (and appreciated) more XP centric code samples. It also would have perhaps been better if the tricks and tips were seperately described for each OS. I'd recommend this to anyone looking to keep their software off the 0-day warez boards.

Rating:
Summary: More of a FAQ than educational
Review: It's great that there's a book like this out to begin with, but I was disappointed to see the focus only on Windows applications and mostly on how to use existing tools to harden your software. It doesn't really cover as much as I would have liked to have seen on how to actually implement crack-resistant software. Much of the book's contents are FAQ-like and refer only to currently available tools (a very current practical approach versus a broader theoretical academic approach). If the exact problem you're trying to solve is explicitly addressed in this book, you're golden - if not, you're completely out of luck with regards to the book's information.

Rating:
Summary: Human Ingenuity (Spy vs. Spy)
Review: Much of current software defenses against crackers consists of preventing or detecting breakins to your computer from across a network. The cracker is inherently at a disadvantage. For one, you (the sysadmin) have physical access to your machine. You can reboot it at will; compare signatures of installed programs against known signatures that are stored readonly; and you can install network analysers and other computers to check your main machine.

But there is an entirely different cracker activity where she now has built in edges. This consists of where you write code that others can install on their computers. Your code can end up on a cracker's machine. She has (you have to assume) a good deassembler and decompiler, and is fluent in the assembly language of your code.

You don't have it easy. Cerven explains the many measures you might take to protect the running of your code. Alas, for most of these, if not all, over time, a sufficiently talented cracker can find a countermeasure. The book is a tribute to human ingenuity. As a purely intellectual puzzle, you may find his explanations intriguing.

He describes a small cottage industry of companies that offer licensing programs that try to control access to your code. The best known may be installshield. This is very common on Microsoft platforms. Also mentioned is flexlm, which unix sysadmins should find familiar.

The bottom line is given in the last chapter. A list of suggested best practices. None of which are guaranteed to offer absolute protection. But the cumulative applications of these practices should act as a good deterrent.

The only thing that seems to be missing is a discussion of code that comes on DVDs. He describes CDs. Surely by now some large code packages must come on DVDs. (Especially the games.)