• Reverse engineering windows software

    SapnaVishwas Member

    I am a student and need help to crack this software/model (U.S. pension analysis) for educational purposes. The registration requires using a command in the software that produces a register.me file. This file is then required to be emailed to a person in the software company. The person then sends two different files, .use and .exe (the main program executer). Upgrading involves replacing the old files. I tried learning reverse engineering through lena’s tutorial but do not have much time before i need to submit my report.

    Can someone help me with this, or refer me to another source where they can help me with reverse engineering windows software.

  • Amit Member

    Did they not teach you how to use debuggers in the class? I found reversing to be extremely difficult and haven’t tried in a long time but hopefully will come back to it. It sounds like you have to figure out what that activator does without actually having it. I’m not very knowledgeable but what I can say is , the activator program has to talk to the main program somehow and what are all the ways 2 programs without internet can talk to each other? The activator could launch the program with command line arguments , it could write something to the registry that the main program can then see, or the activator could inject something into the memory space of the main program, there are also message queues I don’t know much about. If the activator is indeed a patch for the program to give the rest of the functionality, then you are screwed. Here’s some links about inter process communication

    http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/203149/how-do-i-get-my-programs-to-communicate-with-each-other
    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9557631/how-do-programs-communicate-with-each-other 
    

    It sounds like to me the .use file might be a cryptographic key possibly I don’t know. You can reverse engineer the .me file format by looking putting breakpoints on all the fwrite calls in the program and then finding where it’s writing to the .me file and see what it’s writing to it and why. I always wished someone would help teach me how to reverse engineer but atlas I think you need to know people or be really really really driven to learn it.

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