Hi Jos,

I'm not going to pretend I'm an experienced hacker and do know all the tricks etc. So yes, I believe to a large extend you're right. Everything is crackable.

However, there is a combination of two factors that makes it difficult to to crack VFP applications crackable when protected by armadillo.

The first is that armadillo has a few protection mechanisms to protect its contents from debugging and memory dumping. The hacker first has to find out which protection mechanism and second, a way to crack it.

Second. VFP is a interpretated language. Not native code. This makes it much harder to crack. Not neccesarely all source code resides in memory as your VFP application is just data (in fact armadillo just handles it like data). AFAIK, Resources are loaded into memory when required. This means that if you did not open a certain form yet, it does not reside in memory.

Also, Though I certainly believe that it would be possible to crack certain applications protected with armadillo (e.g. .NET applications), It seems highly unlikely that an experienced hacker also has enough knowledge about VFP to crack your application. And if you also like me strip the source code (debugging info) from the executable, you might ask if any hacker is going to do such amount of work to actually crack your application.

Armadillo seems the best option nowerdays to protect your software. It has advanced protection mechanism and offers you a dozen ways to protect your application from piracy. Though you're right that Armadillo itself has been cracked a couple of times in the past, I did not get any message yet that applications protected with armadillo were cracked.

Further, Armadillo is constantly improved. Every few weeks or months there is a new release with new features and bugfixes.

I've been using armadillo for a couple of years now, mainly for its compression of the executable. My 7 MB VFP executable compresses into a 2.5 MB one.

Walter,


>At the end of the day the app needs to run in memory, unprotected. That is where your app is vulnerable to a whole host of attack vectors. Of course your comment about attacking Armadillo instead of the application directly - well why not? It's fair game to the cracker. They just want the code, or at least, to an understanding of how it works.
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>The key imo to the discussion of copy protection is (a) what do you want to protect, (b) for how long, and (c) from who? If you want to stop frivolous copying and to provide some level of protection against all but knowledgable hackers then Armadillo, Konxise, etc, will do the trick.
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>>Hi jos,
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>>>Walter, Armadillo has been cracked. All protection schemes are crackable. It's just a matter of time and effort. Any software installed on an end-user PC can be cracked. But one may as well make it as hard as possible :)
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>>As far as I've been told, all attempts to crack armadillo were about to crack armadillo itself and certain features within armadillo (e.g. keys protection, timeout protection etc), not the software itself it is to protect.
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>>Of course, you're right that it is possible to crack anything, however, with the help of keys you can create such algorithms that it takes too much time to crack it. I don't know the internals of Armadillo, but I can imagine that something simular is used there.
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>>Walter,
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