INTRODUCTION:

As we all know “Ghost” and similar disk copying/backup applications are excellent tools for end users for cloning hard drives or for corporate rollouts.

The problem lies with the word, cloning. These programs make a copy of a partition (and sometimes the MBR) and then end users have a re-usable image of the authorized programs on that machine. They can then install working copies on all their other machines and distribute the products to others.

Ghosting or disk backup has to the be the fastest and easiest way to casually copy your software – indeed many end users don’t really even thinks it’s piracy as the technique has become so well known and easy to do.

None of this is good news for your bottom line…and the CFO!

So Nalpeiron came up with several ways to help prevent casual copying using ghost-type programs.

First, our basic technology prevents most types of basic disk copying, period.

However, in cases where the user tries to make a full copy of a drive including the Master Boot record (MBR) we have developed a further way to prevent copying. 

USING THE NALPEIRON GHOST BLOCKING

In cases where you suspect disk cloning by end users you have two choices, use the standard protection or use the advanced protection.

The standard protection is built-in and there is no need to do any extra work, but it will not protect against deeper uses of ghosting that use a ‘bit by bit’ cloning process.

If you want to beat those types of cloning attempts you will need to use the advanced protection.

This is very simple; all you have to do is select the “Lock product to HD serial number” radio button when creating your custom DLL.

This option is a secondary level of protection against programs that copy the entire hard disk partition. This function locks the license to the HDD serial number (where present) and therefore prevents the use of ghost type programs from “backing up” a fully licensed copy of your product.

This essentially makes the custom DLL look for and lock the licensing to a specific HDD number. If the disk is cloned and placed on a new machine, before the program runs it will check for the same serial number and if it doesn’t find that it will prevent the application from running and show an error code.

WORKING WITH CORPORATE “ROLLOUTS” USING GHOST TECHNIQUES

You should consider who will be using your software before applying the advanced clone blocking, as the built-in protection maybe enough, and it will also probably allow for the corporates to make legitimate copies of your software when doing rollouts. In other words using the standard protection will keep down casual copiers but at the same time allow for corporate use.

If you plan to use the advanced protection then you should also consider a further option when setting your DLL called “Revert to demo mode when hard drive serial number change detected”.

If you have chosen the “Lock product to HD serial number” option you should be aware that this prevents the wholesale use of corporate tools that clone 100’s PCs and make it easy for them to deploy many applications at once e.g. Microsoft SMS. You may wish to allow that process for certain customers.

The “revert to demo mode” feature assists in this regard in that all the machines will revert to a trial when they are rolled out. Without this selected the recipient machines will not work due to the block above.

This will allow your installs to be rolled out across many PCs from an image of an authorized installation but will revert all the cloned machines to “demo mode” until they are activated (authorized) correctly.

In other words, if you don’t select this then all the cloned machines will fail without showing a demo period, they can still be activated but the user cannot use the program until they activate. But if you do they will gracefully revert to a mode where they can easily use the product until they are activated and node locked successfully.

TECHNICAL ISSUES WITH GHOST TYPE UTILITIES

The advanced option should be used with care as many older HDDs will not have the correct firmware to allow us to read the HDD serial number and this can cause occasional issues for some users.

You can also make multiple DLLs, one set for end users where you want advanced clone protection and one for corporates where you don’t want such high level protection to facilitate easy rollouts.

If you do decide on multiple DLLs do make sure you have different constants in the DLL and code to prevent these DLLs from being exchanged or used by the wrong users i.e. weaker protection being distributed to other users. The constants will ensure that the DLLs will only work with the matching application version.

Russell Carroll (Ricochet) reveals that one of his Company’s games has a 92% piracy rate!

“It looks like around 92% of the people playing the full version of Ricochet Infinity pirated it.”

Knowing many other gaming companies these is not that unusual – what is odd is that so little has been done to effectively fight the pirates.

It’s moments like those that make people in the industry stop dead in their tracks. 92% is a huge number and though we were only measuring people who had gotten the game from Reflexive and gone online with it, it seemed improbable that those who acquired the game elsewhere or didn’t go online were any more likely to have purchased it. As we sat and pondered the financial implications of such piracy, it was hard to get past the magnitude of the number itself: 92%.

In casual gaming where most of the industry sells an Internet-distributed product, piracy is a common problem. Any quick search will help you find and illegally acquire every casual game you can imagine.

One way to fight the search-engine facilitated piracy is to work to remove the ever-expanding number of links to illegal copies, but in many cases improving the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system to be more secure can be more effective as it renders a large number of those links obsolete.

So developers are left trying to get ISP’s, web sites and other crack destinations to remove illegal copies but that’s a practical impossibility – as is getting rid of all the people on eBay selling cracked copies too – I know I have tried and tried!

So the next best thing is the use a better copy protection system and prevent all the usual leakage from happening by focusing on a more robust approach to all the areas of weakness.

Here are a few examples to strengthen your protection without making life hard for the end user:

• Don’t use a wrapper based protection and make sure when you write the code you spend time using techniques to make removing protection calls from the code itself difficult;
• Don’t use a keygen system that is available to others (i.e. many protection vendors ship the server side keygen code or keygens themselves);
• Don’t use a weak system that writes to the registry or has some other file based protection that can be circumvented or copied (e.g. windows);
• Make sure that there is a total end-to-end security policy with encryption i.e. it only takes one part of the chain to be broken to break the whole system;
• Watch out for simple loopholes like the use of Ghost or VM’s to clone working copies or provide unlimited demos;
• Check the vendor’s tools are not widely cracked, this is only a problem for dongles and wrapper based protections as these are universal – crack once, break all the products;
• Don’t use a system that creates a fingerprint of the recipient PC or alphanumeric codes as these just make it very hard for the end user and they will complain;

See this useful article about beating the crackers

Russell makes the point perfectly:

This is tricky to be sure, because improving the security must be done without making the DRM so onerous that it keeps honest customers from purchasing games.

He is admits to one part of the problem:

Reflexive, where I work, is in a peculiar position in this regard. Whereas most of the casual games industry licenses their DRM from a vendor, Reflexive has its own in-house DRM. Over the years it has undergone many improvements, including several changes made specifically to combat piracy.

Of course if you build your own you had better know how to do all of the above and more or you will suffer – Reflexive have proven the case with a 92% piracy rate.

So, you need a strong protection product but one that’s also very easy to use for the end user!

Reflexive have had to keep fixing and wasting engineering time and effort to stem the tide against them and indeed it seems after much effort they have got their in-house system up to speed and it has made a big difference = Sales up 70%

Fixing The Holes – The Results

Below are the results of Reflexive.com sales and downloads immediately following each update:
Fix 1 – Existing Exploits & Keygens made obsolete – Sales up 70%, Downloads down 33%
Fix 2 – Existing Keygens made obsolete – Sales down slightly, Downloads flat
Fix 3 – Existing Cracks made obsolete – Sales flat, Downloads flat
Fix 4 – Keygens made game-specific – Sales up 13%, Downloads down 16% (note: fix made after the release of Ricochet Infinity)

From the results above, it seems clear that eliminating piracy through a stronger DRM can result in significantly increased sales..

However, if they had started off with protection without most of the issues in the first place that would have surely saved not only such a high piracy rate but also all the manpower and engineering costs?

Read the full article here:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350

As technology and distribution media continued to evolve, the market has produced solutions that break down into four main areas.

Each of these solutions offers its own strengths and weaknesses, but all of them have one thing in common: they are still weapons in the ongoing cat-and-mouse battle between software developers and pirates, and should be constantly evolving.

Beware of copy protection vendors who promise you a totally uncrackable system.

Nevertheless, these systems can help to protect your intellectual property by making it more difficult for pirates to crack them. They can also be used to help control the distribution of your software and offer payment alternatives, such as try before you buy, usage payments, and timed (lease) payments.

Dongles

Considered old hat by most developers, dongles are expensive on a per-product basis because of the extra manufacturing costs involved. They also reduce the flexibility for the end user.

Nevertheless, dongles are still used on more expensive software products where the cost of the protection is in line with the cost of the software, and standard USB key dongles have helped to reduce this price threshold.

For more details about the misconceptions surrounding dongle security, see our quick guide, The Truth about Hardware Dongles.

Media protection

The introduction of media such as CD and DVD has led to commercial duplication systems that introduce deliberate errors into the CD during the burning process. These errors contain patterns that can be used by the program on the CD to check that it is being loaded from the original media. While these systems can yield results, they cannot work effectively with online distribution because there is no media involved.

Crackers have also reportedly circumnavigated various generations of this protection, meaning that it must be constantly updated, just like other systems.

Software wrappers

Evolving from the loader based mechanisms found in some software protection systems, software wrappers are considered by many developers to be among the easiest products to use, because they are often designed to be easily integrated into any product.

However, that ease of use comes at a price. Once cracked, a software wrapper can be countered with an un-wrapper that is easy to distribute and run.

Developers should also be wary of future operating system developments when using wrappers.

Unless you are sure that your wrapper solution will survive Windows Vista and future operating system upgrades, for example, you could find yourself with increasing support costs in the future.

Software Development Kits

An SDK is a piece of copy protection code that has been developed for a specific application environment.

SDK’s are harder to implement than wrapper technology because you must be a developer with the tools that built the original application. They can nevertheless be relatively simple to implement if the correct solution is chosen.

SDK’s are stronger and harder to hack than wrappers and much cheaper and more flexible than dongles. They also tend to have more features and integrate with applications much more tightly, allowing for features such as custom screens, for example.