>> Took me 17 machines and about 50 total hours to break this one...
>
>Mhmm, do you mean you actually bored through the safe door instead of walking around it? Impressive. ;-) Anyway, that's an awful lot of CPU cycles. And it is a lot more than the 15 seconds that a P3 class machine needs to brute-force an app that uses the Refox runtime-file branding (all the other Refox branding levels can be decompiled directly because they only leave some marks in the app that tell other Refoxes to back off).


Yes, it's a lot of CPU time to hack around this way, and I think this is a much better approach than refox. HOWEVER...3 obvious problems:

1. It takes an extra sec or two to load the .exe since it has to decompress it first.

2. It IS possible to brute force attack it, which means anyone with something like AZPR could get the zip password. (eventually)

3. With a process/memory viewer and a few other goodies you could get the password from memory as it uses it, and once you found the memory address it used it would take you just a couple of seconds to defeat this every time!

This is better, but still.....very hackable.