Seems like it was an appropriate amount of engineering. Looks like this took between an afternoon and a week with the help of an emulator and decompiler. Imagine trying to do this back then without those tools.
The protection just needs suficirntly complex.
In most cases it was not much more difficult than what OP described.
To expand on the saying, they're not there to be insurmountable. Just to be hard enough to make it easier to do things the right way.
I’d guess it’s something similar with this dongle. You can’t “accidentally” run the software without the dongle.
I think that both halves of the author's thesis are true: I bet that you could use this device in a more complicated way, but I also bet that the authors of the program deemed this sufficient. I've reversed a lot of software (both professionally and not) from that era and I'd say at least 90% of it really is "that easy," so there's nothing you're missing!
I know there is cost associated with the hardware, but surely the costumer can cough 15 more dollars.
The only reason I can think of is wanting as wide adoption before max revenue as possible. But then, this has never been too popular, not even for games!
I think sometime in the late 1990s FlexLM switched from dongles to "hardware identifiers" that were easily spoofed; honestly I don't think this was a terrible idea since to this article's conclusion, if you could reverse one you could reverse the other.
But this concept was insanely prevalent for ~20 years or so.
One of the biggest problems was not having enough ports. Some parallel port dongles tried to ignore communication with other dongles and actually had a port on the back; you'd make a "dongle snake" out of them. Once they moved to USB it was both easier and harder - you couldn't make the snake anymore, but you could ask people to use a hub when they ran out of ports.
When parallel ports were discontinued, they migrated to USB and network license servers.
I find it interesting that they didn't make it into the USB era where you could easily have something that does some actual processing on the device that makes it a serious challenge to reverse engineer.
More common for games was to use the media itself for copy protection, using a variety of tricks to make copy more difficult. Other techniques involve printing some keys you have to enter using colors that don't render well in photocopies, or have you look at words a certain page of a thick user manual, the idea being that it is more expensive to go through the effort of copying this material than to buy the software legally.
One of my favorite is from Microprose games, for which the manual was a pretty good reference book on the subject of the game, that alone is worth buying. And the copy protection is about asking you about information contained in the book, for example, it may be some detail about a particular plane in a flight simulator, which means that a way to bypass copy protection is simply to be knowledgeable about planes!
Dongles were common, but mostly for expensive enterprise software. Also, dongles don't make cracking harder compared to all the other techniques, so for popular consumer software like games, it is likely to be a lot of inconvenience and a waste of money for limited results.
Apparently there is important stuff still running in emulated PDP-11s, almost double the age.
>Very importantly, there doesn’t seem to be any “input” into this routine. It doesn’t pop anything from the stack, nor does it care about any register values passed into it. Which can only mean that the result of this routine is completely constant!
The code decrypted itself, which confused debuggers, and then loaded a special sector from disk. It was a small sector buried in the payload of a larger sector, so the track was too big to copy with standard tools. The data in the sector was just the start address of the program. My fix was to change executable header to point to the correct start address.
I had to do this for a company so they could continue to use their old specialised Win98 software on modern computers using Dosbox and an emulator.
Since we sold (and still sell) perpetual licenses, it becomes a problem when a dongle breaks and replacement parts are no longer available. Not all users want to upgrade. Also, you may hate cloud licensing, but it is precisely cloud licensing that makes subscriptions possible and, therefore, recurring revenue—which, from a business point of view, is especially important in a field where regulations do not change very fast, because users have little incentive to upgrade.
Also, despite investing a lot of effort into programming the dongle, we can still usually find cracked versions floating online, even on legitimate platforms like Shopee or Lazada. You might think cracking dongles is fun and copy protection is evil, but without protection, our livelihood is affected. It’s not as if we have the legal resources to pursue pirates.
Nowadays we don't bother with copyright protection other than a license key, because we know enterprises generally will pay their bills if you put up any indication at all that a bill is required to be paid.
This was basically the 80s version of that.
kwanbix•1h ago