Cracking DNS WORKSHOP

Teaching a decryption process step by step

by Hackmore Readrite

(27 August 1997)


Courtesy of fravia's page of reverse engineering

Well, a thorough work of reverse engineering, Hackmore analyses deeply a decryption scheme, which jumps around quite a lot in order to "confuse" the wannabyes

                           Cracking DNS WORKSHOP

                            By Hackmore Readrite
                               DataMiners Inc.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Program: DNSWorkShop.exe (no version info)
Size:    324,096 Bytes
From:    http://www.evolve.co.uk
Price:   Around $40.00 U.S.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

   FIRST, A NOTE FROM HACKMORE:

In my humble opinion, this is a totaly useless program with a totaly useless, but extremely interesting, de-cryption scheme. It uses the "Cinderella" time protection scheme, 30 days, but it's the registration process that got me interested in it.

August arrived with the promise of help in my "real life" job, which left me with extra time on my hands, something I'm unaccustomed to. So with an active mind, and time to spare, I began looking through the lessons +FRAVIA has so kindly posted on his web pages. Eventualy, I drew two conclusions:

1) A lot of these lessons deal primarily with how "I" cracked this program, instead of how "TO" crack this program. To achieve "ZEN", we must "feel" whats happening in a program. To do this, we must instictively "know" whats going on in the program. We need to teach WHAT a program is DOING, NOT which bytes should be modified to crack the program.

2) It's been a VERY long time since we heard from our teacher. (+ORC sent lesson 4.2 last April.) So I figured somebody should assume the role to teach us something new.

With these points in mind, I began preparing a lesson on de-cryption techniques. My idea was to extract ALL of the code which processes the registration code you enter when registering DNSWorkShop, explain whats happening at EACH instruction, remove confusing line numbers and replace them with informative labels, and nest the sub-processes so you could see just where you were at any given point in the process.

The idea was intended to "teach" new comers how the de-cryption process works, step by step, NOT how to reverse the process. Most of MY lessons deal with very little code, I prefer instead to explain the process so I don't "scare" new comers away from cracking. But the lesson I was preparing was nearly all, very well documented, code.

Needless to say, as I was almost finished, fravia+ asked that we keep the code in our lessons to a minimum, and +ORC re-surfaced!

Although my hard work was wasted, and this program is so easily cracked, I still think I should explain the de-cryption process to anyone interested because the scheme is so elaborate. The author does just about anything he can to keep the potential cracker so busy and confused, the cracker will finaly just give up. Yet this beautiful scheme was wasted in a program that can be cracked by changing only 1 byte!

At the end of this lesson, I'll show you a "temporary" crack as well as a "permanent" crack. Neither crack has anything to do with this de-cryption method. If you use my crack, you wont even have to register! So if you're not here to learn, you might as well jump to the goodies you're after. But you'll miss all the fun stuff if you do.

You'll probably find this lesson will be much easier to understand if you will get the program, dis-assemble it with WDASM, and study the code as I describe what the code is doing. This program can be easily cracked using only a dead listing, so give it a try.


Enough digression, let's get to work. I'll assume at this point you've downloaded and installed the program, used it a bit, and are ready to get yourself a good working copy.

With SoftIce running, we'll load the program. Locate the "register" button and press it, and a little box pops up asking for your registration code. At this point, you have no idea if you should enter numbers or letters or both, so you can just type in your name. You might notice alot of extra room in the box, because it can take up to 26 characters.

Press F5 or to enter SoftIce, and do a search for the information you entered...
s ds:0 lffffffff "string you entered"
Now you've found it, so you place a breakpoint on it...

bpr ds:"start of string" ds:"end of string" rw

And F5, let the program run. SoftIce breaks back in when the string you entered is being copied to a new location. Now you place a new breakpoint, just like you did above, and press F5 again to return to the program. The program runs its course, without ever breaking on your string again!

What happened?! You were in a Windows module. When you wern't looking, the main program returned, so your breakpoint was invalid. Just re-load the program, do the steps above again, and when you get to the second address of your string, hold down the F8 (trace) button for a few seconds to let the program re-gain control. Now do a new search for your string again, set a breakpoint on it, and get ready for the fun stuff!

              ***   :0043BE63 8A00   mov al , [eax]   ***
													   
SoftIce will kick back in at the address CS:0043BE63, where you'll be retrieving the first byte of your input string, and placing it into EAX for processing. Now would be a good time to shut down SoftIce, and load DNSWorkShop into WDASM for dis-assembly. We used SoftIce to quickly find where this program begins working on our input string, and it's a good thing we did because we got to this sub-routine by an indirect call, which makes finding this location in a dead listing very tedious.

But now that we know where to start, a dead listing will work just fine for the rest of this lesson. If you'll follow this through, using either SoftIce or a dead listing, here's what you will find...

Eax is cleared, leaving only the first byte from your string. This byte is copied to ECX, then checked to see if it's a number, a letter, or a symbol.
If your character is not one of the above, (if it's a graphics or control character) you get kicked out. If your character is a letter, it's checked again to see if it's an upper case letter or a lower case letter.
   If it's a...             Do this...
   ------------------------------------------
   Upper case letter        subtract 37
   lower case letter        subtract 3D
   number                   subtract 30
   symbol                   change to 3F
   control character        change to 3E
			   
Now save the result in memory (at [00440030]) for later, get the next byte in the string, and process it the same way. We'll save the result of this second byte as the value of EDI, because we're not using EDI for anything else right now, and our memory location already has the first byte stored in it, and we're about to do some math which will require EAX. Here's an exerpt from the original lesson I told you about earlier in this lesson...

MAIN
   mov edi, eax              ;store result for use after MULTIPLY
   mov eax, 00000040         ;the number to multiply by
   call MULTIPLY

   MULTIPLY
      imul edx, [00440030], 08088405  ;EAX * EDX * "KEY" * 08088405
      inc edx                         ;add "1" just for fun
      mov [00440030], edx             ;save as next "KEY"
      mul edx                         ;EAX * EDX (low bytes * high bytes)
      mov eax, edx                    ;save the high order double word
      ret                             ;to MAIN

MAIN
   xor edi, eax                       ;finish de-crypting the first byte
   mov eax, edi                       ;save the result

Here, we do a signed multiplication. If SBR is your Second Byte Result, and FBR is your First byte result, the equation would look like this:
                     IMUL   40 * SBR * FBR * 08088405
			   
Just in case our result was too small to get a number into EDX, we'll add a "1" to EDX to be sure we'll have a "key" to use on the next byte. Then save this "high order byte + 1" to use as the next "key" value.

The result of our IMUL leaves the result in EDX:EAX, meaning the biggest part of the number is in EDX, and the lesser numbers are placed in EAX. So the next step multiplies the large part of the number by the low part of the number. To put this all in perspective, lets say the result of the IMUL instruction turned out to be 3031323334 in hex:
              EDX would equal 30        
   So the next step would multiply 31 * 31323334, which, again, leaves
the
result in EDX:EAX. The low order bits (in EAX) are thrown away as we
move
the high order bits (in EDX) into EAX. Anyone concerned with reversing
this
process might find it difficult without the bytes we throw away.
										

We now XOR the result of this process against the result we got when we processed the second byte of our input registration code. Remember, we saved that result in EDI just before we started multiplying.

We'll take the result from above and "fix" it depending on it's value using the same formula from above, but this time ADDING 30, 37, or 3D to obtain a number, upper case letter, or lower case letter. (Remember, we subtracted these same values when we began this process) We also get the options of comming up equal to 3D, or 3E, (which will pass the "ok" range of characters), or getting kicked out if we end up with an invalid character. If you had entered a bunch of random characters into the input box, AND if you got REAL lucky, the character you MIGHT end up with at this point MIGHT be the first letter of your name, which is what we would LIKE to see here!

If we've made it this far, we get a chance to store our first de-crypted byte for future use. Again, here's an excerpt from my original lesson...
STORAGE PROCESS
The de-cryption process is now completed for this byte of our registration code. The storage process takes the byte we have placed on the stack, and checks for any errors we may have encountered,such as an "out of range" byte, etc. If an error is found, a flag is set and we're sent to the function which processes error codes and, of course, get kicked out of the program.

If all goes well, we get an address to store this byte in memory, then store this byte. If you follow each byte through it's storage process, you will notice there are many different places in memory where these bytes are stored, in a seemingly random pattern. Only one byte of de-crypted code will be stored at each location, but it will be stored as a double-word. (Each place in memory will have the bytes "00 00 00 10" when we arive, and we'll replace the "10" with our de-crypted byte, so it might look like "00 00 00 41" if our input character de-crypted to the letter "A".) This address MIGHT get used again, overwriting the byte we store there with a new byte, or it MIGHT NOT. This is important to note for cracking purposes!

When we get a few bytes packed away in memory, we set up a new address where we'll create a (doubleword sized) partial string, adding de-crypted bytes as we get them. We will attatch ONLY the bytes just de-crypted in the steps above, to the end of this partial string, so our partial string might look like "Hack" in memory when we're through with it. Once again, if you follow the process through, you will find these "partial strings" get copied a few times too. The "partial string" we leave behind MIGHT get over-written, or it MIGHT be left alone for processing later.

Eventualy, we'll get an address where we'll place the entire de-crypted registration string, which will be used to determine wether or not we've registered properly. If you view the memory location, it might look like "Hackmore Readrite - 1234", The string YOU get will, of course, depend on the input you provide. If you entered your name as I suggested above, you'll probably end up with a garbled string of numbers, letters, and symbols.

The storage addresses selected change with the length of the registration code you type in. If your string is too long, you'll get to see your de-crypted string stored in memory right below the original string you typed in. This may be handy for anyone who might want to compare strings.

After storing this single byte, we get a chance to spend alot of frustrating time looking up addresses and anything else the author of this program could think of to slow us down. This takes us through all kinds of code to NOT check our string against what has been saved in the registry. It's a very long process dealing with setting up addresses, checking string length and values, and setting "switch" values to determine wether or not the machine should enter the registry yet. (Has the entire string been processed?, Is the string length correct?, etc.) Since we're not already registered, a switch will always tell the program not to enter the registry yet. This process was probably placed here to frustrate the average cracker, by making the process so long you just give up. And remember, it's repeated after EACH byte we'll de-crypt, and MANY times later as you'll see!

The next two processes are rather boring. The first checks each byte in the de-crypted string, and if it is an asterix "*" it will be passed into the second process, which will convert it to a space " " character. This will check, and repair if nessesary, each byte of the de-crypted string.

Yet another chance to check our de-crypted code against whats stored in the registry, (remember, we're still UNREGISTERED so there's nothing to check against!) along with the normal error checks and clean-up to finish up these sub-routines. As usual, if an error is found, we'll be kicked out of the program. If everything looks good, we'll set a bunch of bytes in memory to tell the program it's alright to go on to the next process. Since we're not already registered, a switch will tell the program not to open the registry yet, but we still have to cruise through all the code pertaining to opening, reading, and closing the registry each time we come through this "registry check" crap. Basicaly, this is just one more attempt to slow down the average cracker, although this time, some of what is done IS important, like cleaning up after the sub routine, and setting bytes in memory to tell the program it's ok to proceed.

This is the point where we learn that our input string should have been 24 characters long. So do the steps above 23 more times, and you will have de-crypted the entire string. But we're not even close to being done yet, unless you just came for the de-cryption lesson. What will we do with this de-crypted string in order to determine if you've registered properly? Read on to learn more.
              ***   :0043BEB5 E88AFEFFFF   call 0043BD44   ***
				   
Now it's time to DO something with this string we've de-crypted so nicely. We'll start at the end, rather than the beginning, because (if you saw the MULTIPLY code earlier) the end of the string is where we would be MOST likely NOT to succeed. An error EARLY in the process would have a "snowball" effect right on down the line, getting larger, and larger as we de-crypted each byte, because the result of one pass through the MULTIPLY sub-routine sets the "key" for the next pass.

Do the math if you are inclined, but to put it simply, from an incredibly large number of possible combinations of characters, we only have ten choices for the end of our string. The last four characters MUST be NUMBERS (0 - 9) or we get kicked out of the program.

Assuming YOU were lucky enough to end up with four numbers at the end of your de-crypted string, (I sure wasn't), the program copies the last doubleword of your de-crypted string to a new location in memory. Pour yourself a tall one for this process because you'll also get to NOT enter the registry FOUR more times durring this process, complete with error checking, address look-ups, etc.

With our doubleword in hand, we'll strip away the first byte, convert it to decimal (subtract 30), multiply the "talley" (which is "0" for the first character), double the result, and add our decimal number to it. Then do the same for the remaining three bytes. For an example of this, read just a bit further. We'll have to do this one more time, so I've included the code and an explanation when we reach that point in this de-cryption scheme.

Just in case we wandered in here with something other than numbers in our de-crypted doubleword, we get all kinds of chances to get kicked out of the program. And they'll all send us away thinking we've done a good thing, until much later when the error flag gets tested. Then it's good bye bad cracker! If we've done a good job, we'll sail through all that registry crap again, complete with all the frills, about three more times.

If nothing has gone wrong, we move the result from this last process back onto the stack, determine the length of our de-crypted string WITHOUT the last four bytes which we just processed above, determine an address to copy the shortened de-crypted string to, (without the last four bytes), determine if a registration string exists in the registry yet, (only reading it if it IS there), or if you have only just typed it in, and finaly, we'll move the shortened de-cryped string to a new address, without the last four bytes. The original string and the original de-crypted string will remain where they have been placed in memory. They will each contain thier entire 18h (24 dec) bytes of input code, or de-crypted code respectively.

              ***   :0043BF54 E89B77FCFF   call 004036F4   ***
														  
And, after a bit of setup, (getting addresses and updating counters) we're ready for the next step, a very simple process of adding each byte of the shortened de-crypted string together, to get a sum of the hex values of each de-crypted byte. ((H=48) + (a=61) = A9 + (c=63) = 10C + (k=6B) = 177... etc. Until we've added all of the remaining 20 bytes, spaces are skipped though.)

After this 20 byte de-crypted string is tallied, it's added to "3" just for kicks, and this doubleword result is saved for a CMP instruction later.

Ahh... My ears are ringing with the sound of all those happy crackers out there thinking "JUST FIX THE CMP INSTRUCTION!" If you've read this far, you will know that this program has MANY error checks! One slip and you WILL get kicked out.

When registered, this program stores the string you entered into the registry under:
    \HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Info Evolution\DNS WorkShop\Registration
	  
And when it goes there to check up on you, you'll get kicked out before you ever reach that CMP instruction. The string is stored in the registry exactly as you typed it in, so each time the program is run, the string goes through this same process again. Fixing the CMP instruction WILL get you "registered", and you'll get to see your de-crypted input string in the cute little box that say's "Successfuly registered to...", but when you re-open the program, your "saved" input string will pass through this same process again, and you will be UN-registered. There's no "zen" in that!

Now that we have all the work done on our input string and the resulting de-crypted string, it's time to check access rights. This is a VERY long process that jumps to places all over the program just to completely confuse anyone who has made it this far. All it does is check a two character string to determine if this is a (%d) demo version, or a (%u) user version. Anything other than a "d" or a "u" will get you kicked out of the program. Again, the author lets you "play around" awhile before he lets you get kicked out. So you'll get to do alot of jumps from a jump table, and a lot of checks for "$", " ", "-", "+", "*", etc. You'll also get to check for numbers, and capitalize lower case letters. Anything and everything to confuse the "wanna-be" cracker.

And, just for fun, when we're done with the distraction above, the author was kind enough to throw in a few more trips past the registry, with all the frills as usual. What a nice guy!

But finaly we return to the task at hand. Just a bit more code to help me explain this step. This is the code, and explanation of it, that I promised you when we were working with the last four bytes of the de-crypted input string. Here we're working with the doubleword result derived from adding the first 20 bytes of our de-crypted string. This is another snippet of code from my original lesson...

NEXT_BYTE
   test bl , bl            ;do we have a byte to process?
   je EXIT                 ;leave if we don't
   sub bl, 30              ;convert to a decimal number
   cmp bl, 09              ;is it a number?
   ja EXIT                 ;leave if it's not
   cmp eax, edi            ;make sure our number hasn't grown too large
                           ;(we put "0CCCCCCC" in EDI earlier in this proc)
   ja EXIT                 ;leave if we got too big
   lea eax, [eax + 4*eax]  ;use an address as our tally
   add eax, eax            ;EAX = "0", but it grows as we calculate.
   add eax, ebx            ;now, add our byte from the doubleword
   mov bl , [esi]          ;get the next byte
   inc esi                 ;set the byte pointer for the next byte
   test bl , bl            ;do we have anything?
   jne NEXT_BYTE           ;if yes, go back to process it
   dec ch                  ;if not, set the flag to leave
   je FLAG_CHECK           ;then go check it, this is a "3-way" flag
                           ;it can be a good "FF" as we've recieved here
                           ;or a bad "00" or "01" which we would pick up
                           ;if this process fails (if we have a letter
                           ;instead of a number, for instance.)

I'll use 1, 2, 3, & 4 as an example of whats going on here for the benifit of all those "wanna-be's" who don't quite understand the math.
      EAX + (4 * EAX)           EAX + EAX             EAX + EBX
      --------------------------------------------------------------
       0 + (4 *  0) =   0  -->    0 +   0 =   0  -->    0 + 1 =   1

       1 + (4 *  1) =   5  -->    5 +   5 =  0A  -->   0A + 2 =   C

       C + (4 *  C) =  3C  -->   3C +  3C =  78  -->   78 + 3 =  7B

      7B + (4 * 7B) = 267  -->  267 + 267 = 4CE  -->  4CE + 4 = 4D2
		 

As you can see, the end result adds up quickly. And this time, we end up with four different values describing the first 20 bytes (or last 4 bytes if you've skipped here from above) of our input string...
   Our input         = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
   De-crypted        = Hackmore Readrite - 
   Sum of Hex values = 1234
   Re-calculated     = 04D2
	 
We are finaly done with all this crap, so now we can return to the main program to use that CMP instruction I spoke of earlier. Of course we must do that registry thing several more times first, just because we've come this far! And as usual we make all three passes (open, read, and close) and do all kinds of error checking and clean-up.

So far we've typed in an input string, de-crypted it, stripped off the last four bytes and checked to be sure they were numbers, re-calculated the result to get yet another number, checked the access rights, added up the hex values of the first 20 bytes of our string, and re-calculated that result to get yet another value. And at last we've reached that "critical" instruction which will let you use this program only once if you care to adjust the values.

              ***   :0043BF8E 3BD8   cmp ebx, eax   ***
						
This also brings us to the end of my lesson on this de-cryption technique. Now I will show you two different ways to crack this program.
Using a dead listing and a bit of "zen", it was obvious that the data address DS:[00440030] was being used for more reasons than just the IMUL instruction listed earlier in this lesson. It did not take long to figure out why after firing up SoftIce.

Load the UNREGISTERED copy of this program into SoftIce, and place a breakpoint on the memory doubleword used in the multiplication sub-routine used for the de-cryption process.
                        BPMD DS:00440030 RW
				 
Then press F5 (ctrl-d) to return to the program. You will pop back into SoftIce very quickly. Press F5 again, and when SoftIce returns dump DS:ESI. Hold the "ALT" key down, while pressing the "down" arrow key 14 times. Here you will see the following encrypted string...
                    Tgq'bxGrrsaiper,Ieuutvm+3
							
After you have registered your program, your registration input string will show up here, and the encrypted string above will be gone. You can follow this through the de-cryption process, (it's a VERY simple process), or you can just take my word for it, but either way, it de-crypts to the following string...

                    ObjectContainer.Network.1
									   
Sorry, lamers, the de-cryption process used to de-crypt this string WILL NOT de-crypt a registration input string! But it WILL give you the name above, which is the "key" to search for in your registry. Once you've found the "key", simply delete it for another FREE 30 DAY TRIAL. This "key" holds the information to tell the program how long you've been using it. It will be replaced the next time you use the program, so you'll have to delete it every thirty days.

That's enough "lamer" training, now I'll show you professionals how to REALY crack the program.

After dis-assembling the file DNSWorkShop.exe using Wdasm, one of the first things you'll notice is the message "No Dialog resources in this aplication." Yet, scanning the dead listing, you'll find several references to "string data reference to code object" within the program. So a simple search for the string "registered" leads us to...
               "Successfuly registered to" at CS:0043C7E3
									  
                                  AND

             "This product is registered to" at CS:0043D377
									   
Our good friend SoftIce was kind enough to show us the exact point where the de-cryption process began. With a little back-tracking from that point, (that's back-TRACKING, not back-TRACING) through the dead listing, we find that the sub-routine containing the address CS:0043BE63 begins at CS:0043BE30, which is called from CS:0043BF30. A bit more back-tracking shows the sub-routine containing the address CS:0043BF30 actualy begins at CS:0043BEE4, which is called from CS:0043C1A0. One more time, we back-track to find the sub-routine containing the address CS:0043C1A0 begins at CS:0043C16C, which is accessed by an indirect call from somewhere.

Logic, or "zen" would dictate that this is probably the "true" begining of the registration process. (Because it's CALLer is a mystery, and it leads us right to the de-cryption process) A quick scan of this small sub-routine shows us that it happily returns to its caller when finished. As you can see by the addresses I've listed above, or better yet by viewing your own dead listing, the code below this sub-routine contains all kinds of "string data" references, including the ones we are after.

But look closely at the sub-routine itself! Right before your very eyes, only four instructions before you call the other sub-routines to get and de-crypt your registration input string, THERE IT IS! THE switch which determines if you are registered, or just a bum using this program for free.
   :0043C195 B301            mov bl, 01         
   Simply changing the "01" to a "00" will crack this program, the "key"
in
your registry called "ObjectContainer.Network.1" will be permantly
removed
from your computers registry, and the registration input string you
typed
will be placed in the "registration" key in your computers registry.
	  

I must confess at this point, I have NOT figured out a way to reverse the math used in the de-cryption process. I know what my name is, so there's no need for me to see it in print. I'm sure the math COULD be reversed though. So when you press the "About this Software" tab, you'll see the message "This product is registered to", but, unfortunately, your name will not be there. If you dis-like this software as much as I do, you'll just throw it away as soon as you're finished learning from it anyway.

I hope you have learned something from this lesson. I've tried to show you that de-crypting is not that difficult, and also the many "traps" a programer might set to slow down and frustrate a potential cracker.

There are several REALY GOOD crackers in the +HCU, maybe someday we'll all get to be as good as they are. I'm working on it, and YOU should be too! But don't let the programers "trick" you into giving up by using methods like the ones I've shown you here.

Welcome back +ORC. Thanks to you, fravia+, and all the rest, for your fine works. We are all islands in a sea of greed, but together we can form a continent. Legend has it that intellegent life first apeared on dry land.
                                                   Hackmore Readrite
                                                   DataMiners Inc.
													
(c) Hackmore Readrite 1997. All rights reserved
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