Hi Jos,

>Just for thew sake of argument :) ...

>>I Never experienced any problems with Armadillo. Konxise is a product that is aiming on the compression of the exe and actually has no further security other than the compression. For an experienced cracker it would be a piece of cake to crack Konxies where armadillo is more difficult to track.

>For an experienced cracker both products are "easy". They both require memory dumping and similar techniques. This is my point.

This is not true. You can't crack a VFP application by just memory dumping. A VFP application is never loaded into memory entirely (and never in the same way). It loads the resources as neccesary. This might be one of the reasons that crackign a VFP application in armadillo requires a total different approach than regular exe files. It might be that konxise is unpacking the EXE in memory when starting (I never did check), but Armadillo is not. It also has tricks to make memory dumping a lot harder.

>iro problems - just recently I tried Armadillo again. I got access violation errors. Silicon Realms support is very good and they built and sent me new versions to try, debug versions, etc, etc. Nothing helped. I then got the latest, latest version and released it to a group of clients and about 20% of them got problems. And I am not doing anything special in my code by the way. I decided to leave it for now.

Hmmm, strange. I don't have the same experience...

>>As I said, I think you'll have to distinguish between a crack for the products usage (which has been done quite a few times, I agree) and the cracking the exe protection mechanism, which I only know one more or less succesfull adventurous attempt while this strategy probably won't apply to protected VFP exe's.

>Armadillo protected exe's have been cracked. Each subsequent version of Armadillo fixes the way crackers have used but this is a never ending battle.

Can you give me a link to such attempt. I've seen one on the past, to which strategy you probably won't be able to crack a VFP exe.

>>>Lastly, most importantly, the hacker who has the necessary skills and motivation to crack an app protected with Konxise also has essentially the skills and motivation required to crack an app protected with Armadillo.

>>No I don't agree with this statment. Armadillo has been setup as an exe protection system, while konxise has not. The konxise 'protection'is way better to crack with the proper tools because it never was setup to protect the exe. Armadillo OTOH, has many protection mechanisms against the most common cracking strategies. Only very experienced and smart hackers will be able to crack it.

>Walter, this is *the* point I am making. Most exe protection systems will keep out most crackers because most crackers are average. No exe protection system will keep out the experienced cracker.

I know you're trying to get this point accross, and I agree that everything is crackable. However Konxise definately is easier to crack than Armadillo.

>If you really want an awesome anti-cracking exe protection I suggest you look at Thinstall. This is a great product but very expensive.

I'll keep that in mind.

Walter,