Vista Activation Cracked by Brute Force

Bengt writes "The Inquirer has a story about a brute force Vista key activation crack. It's nothing fancy; it's described as a 'glorified guesser.' The danger of this approach is that sooner or later the key cracker will begin activating legitimate keys purchased by other consumers. From the article: 'The code is floating, the method is known, and there is nothing MS can do at this point other than suck it down and prepare for the problems this causes. To make matters worse, Microsoft will have to decide if it is worth it to allow people to take back legit keys that have been hijacked, or tell customers to go away, we have your money already, read your license agreement and get bent, we owe you nothing.'"

Comments

MS would owe at least the key

[yagu]

From the article summary:

To make matters worse, Microsoft will have to decide if it is worth it to allow people to take back legit keys that have been hijacked, or tell customers to go away, we have your money already, read your license agreement and get bent, we owe you nothing.'

I don't see how this is possible, or credible speculation even for a company a evil as MS is perceived on slashdot. I'm no MS fanboy, but I've had reasonable "service" from MS on issues of keys to activate my machines under some unusual circumstances.

This may get sticky for MS, but for goodness sake we've got to find better bashing material on MS (and I believe there be plenty) if we want to maintain any street cred. There's no WAY MS won't be giving license keys to legitimate purchasers of XP (especially considering the vast majority are pre-activated shelf-delivered versions).

(Aside: pure speculation on my part, but one of the most glaring weaknesses of this "claim" may be the notion of brute force, and that that is even a possible approach. Most validation handshakes require a reasonable length of time between attempts to circumvent brute force attacks... if it takes one second between attempts for billions of combinations, you're going to eventually be activating an obsolete OS. Further, after 3 or 4 incorrect attempts, any validation scheme worth its salt will quiesce for some longer inconvenient time... requiring a "cooling off" period before one can make further attempts. This story falls under the heading of "I heard someone say they knew someone whose sister's brother has figured out a Vista activation hack..." Sigh.)

Re:MS would owe at least the key

[DJCacophony]

Any customer who gets their key "stolen" by this program can just take it back - Vista comes with several activations on the same key. Once the customer uses the key, the previous user of it will eventually be required to re-activate.

Re:MS would owe at least the key

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I don't see how this is possible, or credible speculation even for a company a evil as MS is perceived on slashdot. I'm no MS fanboy, but I've had reasonable "service" from MS on issues of keys to activate my machines under some unusual circumstances.

This may get sticky for MS, but for goodness sake we've got to find better bashing material on MS (and I believe there be plenty) if we want to maintain any street cred. There's no WAY MS won't be giving license keys to legitimate purchasers of XP (especially considering the vast majority are pre-activated shelf-delivered versions).

I think you're probably right. However, all companies in similar situations don't act this way. A few years ago I bought a Russian-English translation program for my PC. I got the best one on the market. I didn't use it a lot, but it was useful to me for quick translations from Russian to English for email. At the time I didn't know Russian as well as I do now and while I could do translations by hand, it took a very long time. It was certainly worth the money to have a computer program do it for me in a few seconds and then I could double check the weird parts and re-translate those myself. It turned what might be a 2 hour translation job at the time into a 10 minute job at worse. A year or so later I had a catastrophic Windows failure and had to do a destructive reinstall. Although I had a valid license key for the translation program, it wouldn't work after the reinstall. The vendor told me their keys are valid for one use only and although I explained that I had bought the product (and they knew I had) and had to do a reinstall of Windows, I got basically "Too bad. So sad. Here's a 10% discount off our lowest price." in response, which still meant I had to buy the product at pretty close to it's normal value. I sucked it up and did that and installed my new key. However, I was very angry because I realized that to the software vendor if I needed a new key I was probably a thief and if I wanted another key, I was going to have to pay for it. After another year or so, guess what? Yep, I had to do another destructive reinstall of Windows. I decided not to rebuy the software. The babelfish translator, which is free, is not as good, but my Russian had improved a lot and I had less real use for a computer translation program. For as little as I needed to use one, babelfish was good enough. However, the vendor of the translation program has lost me forever as a customer because they weren't willing to give me the benefit of the doubt about my problem and my choice was either to buy a new key or live without the program. Their attitude was "If you need a new key, you're a thief". Since then a guy on a forum told me the magic needed to make old keys work on a reinstall, but I've never bothered with it.

Actually this crack won't help most people..

[goombah99]

One poster on the crack forum wrote "5 hours and i got 3 legit keys." at 20K/hour that's only 100,000 tries or 33,000 per key. So apparently despite having a 25 digit key space, Microsoft's algorithmic validity check allows 1 in every 33,000 keys. What where they thinking?

As I pointed out in the post above the chance of a randomly generated working activation- key colliding with a legitimate keys is probably worse odds than 1 in a trillion. So this will probably never ever happen by chance.

However, chance might not play a role here. Given this colossal stupidity one also assumes they did something dumb like make the decoded keys have some sort of sequential pattern too, so given enough keys one might be able to figure out how to actually generate keys directly. In that case MS will have a problem with the key-collisions with legitimate keys because people could deliberately generate those.

Why would deliberately generating legitimate keys be a good idea for a cracker? Well, if you do generate a random activation key, it will activate the product but Microsoft will also be able to determine that it's one that it did not issue. So the moment vista phones home or you try to do a system update, or install any piece of software from MS that can check the key (e.g. office), microsoft is gonna shut your genuine ass down. On the other hand if you were to generate a key that coincided with a legitimate key, then MS won't know you filtched it. So there's an incentive to see if MS also made the patterns predictable.

You could of course try to live off line. but that level of piracy is not a threat to MS.

All that said my guess is that this is not possible. If I were creating these keys what I woul dhave done would be to use public key encryption. I'd take the integers 1 to 1 billion, and encrypt them with my private. The the Vista copy caries the public decode key. To validate the vista installer decrypts the user supplied key. If it's a number between 1 and billion, you've been validated. MS can now issue up to 1 billion copies of the software with distinct keys.

What makes you think an EULA has legal force?

[Sycraft-fu]

That they include it means nothing. It is pretty certain that, indeed, an EULA doesn't have legal force and can't make you give up rights you normally have. For example:

I work for a state institution which means in a way I am a part of the state. One of the requirements of the job is that I can't sign any contracts for the state. Anything that requires a signature has to be sent to legal (and we have a hell of a legal team). Employees can't agree to contracts directly. We have, on occasion, gotten software that comes with a written agreement. It is sent to the lawyers, almost totally rewritten, then sent back to the company (who is usually quite surprised). However we've been told not to worry about EULAs or click through agreements. We are allowed to just click ok and go on about our business.

Now why do you suppose that is? Well it is because the legal team believes that they have no legal force, and thus there's no problem. I'm going to guess they are right, they have to be very careful about protecting the state against things like that.

So MS can say in their EULA "We reserve the right to take this software away from you at any time," but that doesn't mean a judge will agree. You can still drag them to small claims court (it's quite cheap to file) and argue your case. If a judge agrees with you, they give you your money back.