Crackproof Your Software: Protect Your Software Against Crackers: Amazon.ca: Pavol Cerven: Books

Product Description

Book Description

This essential resource for software developers highlights the weak points in "well-protected" software, shows how crackers break common protection schemes, and how to defend against crackers. Includes in-depth discussions of anti-debugging and anti-disassembling. The CD-ROM contains compression and encoding software, debuggers and anti-debugging tricks, practical protection demonstrations, and extended examples from the book.

About the Author

Cerven is a software developer with Alcatel. After a brief stint in the world of PC viruses, he now works to protect software against unauthorized copying.

Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
Before you can protect your software well, you must first understand the methods crackers use to crack your software. Read the first page

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Customer Reviews

6 Reviews

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Average Customer Review

4.0 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)

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2.0 out of 5 stars More of a FAQ than educational, Jun 6 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Crackproof Your Software: Protect Your Software Against Crackers (Paperback)

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.

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4.0 out of 5 stars A little dated, 2nd ed. requested!, April 5 2004

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S. Contrast (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crackproof Your Software: Protect Your Software Against Crackers (Paperback)

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.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Human Ingenuity (Spy vs. Spy), April 2 2004

By

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Crackproof Your Software: Protect Your Software Against Crackers (Paperback)

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.)

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Most recent customer reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars A very good start in the subject
Definetely, a must have if you want to write shareware. It's a pretty complete survey of methods and programs to protect your work. Read more

Published on July 3 2003

5.0 out of 5 stars Addressing issues specific to shareware programmers
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... Read more

Published on April 13 2003 by Midwest Book Review