Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
From the article summary:
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.)
Lots of botnets run on windows ... I wonder if they could be commanded to scan for license keys.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I can see it now: thousands of computers worldwide activating keys, just to make life miserable for Microsoft and users. It could be called the "annoy Microsoft Windows Users at home" project.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I guarantee you MSFT will release a patch to reorder license keys or figure out some other solution. If you were the largest software company in the world, and you had a product that was being touted as "more expensive than switching an entire IT department to OSX:, wouldn't you?
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
I think the program actually tries the keys on its own algorithm, and when it finds a valid one it tells you to submit it to microsoft.
Just as I read this article, pandora.com started playing the title cut from David Wilcox's Vista album:
"...and the wide open vista..."
Why not actually try to read the article to see how the program works?
> All Microsoft has to do is block the IP address that is requesting thousands of activations on > separate, invalid keys per second. RTFA. That's nothing like how this works. The actual activation part is totally manual, only the key generation is automated. You can generate keys without any kind of network connectivity.
"I can see it now: thousands of computers worldwide activating keys, just to make life miserable for Microsoft and users. It could be called the "annoy Microsoft Windows Users at home" project."
Yes, but does it run under linux :-)
"as someone who has worked on systems such as these (oh the inhumanity!) we have looked at this particular attack vector. Yes, it is possible. But, when you consider the size of the activation code domain (quadrillions or more of combinations), with the number of legitimate keys (hundreds of millions), and the fact that each request takes some amount of time (a few seconds), it's not too big of a risk. A risk? yes. But there are lots of risks. This is just another one to be put on the list, watched, and mitigated against (as others have said, with blocked IPs and so forth)."
Obviously someone else who didn't read either the article OR all the other user comments - no net connection required to generate the keys - the attempts to change the key are done locally; after a successful local key change, submit the new key for activation.
Blocked IPs won't do jack shit for such a scheme.
Also, you're not trying to find a specific key that works, just one of many, so even with a huge wrong-key space, you'll get a favourable collision with a valid key sooner, rather than later. Its like the same-birthday problem.
I don't see how this is possible, or credible speculation even for a company a evil as MS...
Sorry, that's their EULA. You have two choices when you purchase anything M$, return the package unopened for a full refund or use it. They do not and can not promise it will work and they are not responsible for the actions of others. They regard anything they do beyond the EULA a favor for which you should be grateful, just like they regard anything their software ever does for you. They think you should be so grateful that you do as they say. This is the nature of non free software. Your master may take care of you or they may not and those are the conditions you must agree to if you want to use non free software.
They don't trust you. They made the registration key in the first place to restrict the number of computers you can use before you pay them more. When you call and claim your key does not work, they can't tell the difference between you and someone who's shared their key. Once again, this is the nature of non free software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The problem of generated keys and conflict with legit keys isn't new, so we already know what happens. The same existed for XP -- plus the added collison of dishonest OEM's selling one legit serial number to 100 different people who bought their computers with XP preinstalled -- and we already know what Microsoft chose: to not annoy the paying customers. What it did try to do was go after the OEM's who did that, but _not_ after the victims. The victim never had to do more than call an (automated) telephone number and get another key. It's always been that simple.
Yes, there have been some fucktards too historically, but MS was sane about it so far. I'm not saying they're saintly or anything, feel free to still be anti-MS if it makes you feel any better. Just that their sane. Even if you want to see them as some kind of super-willain, well, as super-villains go, MS was the _sane_ kind so far. The kind who's read the evil overlord's list, not the random lunatic kind. It knows when _not_ to do something that would damage itself very quickly.
Look, there are plenty of real reasons to whine about MS, no need to invent bullshit FUD scenarios. That kind of going into bullshit fantasy land, just to have something bad to say about MS, just damages the credibility of the real complaints.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
AND having gone to the site and read through the ENTIRE thread on their forums;
What we have here is a random number/letter guesser. It's basically a VB Script that guesses random numbers and letters in a string that is the same length as a Vista Key, then inserts it into the registry, overwriting the existing Vista key. You use Magic Jellybean to check when the key has changed, and then manually check it against MS's activation service. Really this is little more than a person manually sitting down and making key guesses. This is why it's called a "Brute Force" attack. There is no intelligence (ie: an algorithm) behind the key guesses at all.
That said, because it IS so simple, it's almost impossible for MS to defend against, since they can't just "ban" any keys made by it like they would a traditional algorithmic keygen. Also, there is an improved version of it posted as source on the boards there, so if you want to take a peek at the code you can.
Here is a link to the forum post in question: http://keznews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2634
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Sorry, that's their EULA. You have two choices when you purchase anything M$, return the package unopened for a full refund or use it.
That may be the case in the US, but in the UK things work slightly differently. If I buy a copy of Vista from a store and it is faulty, for what ever reason, I can return it to the store for a full refund or a replacement. The legalese is "fit for purpose" and "of merchantable quality". Clearly, a copy of vista with an invalid licence key is not fit for purpose.
Incidentally, most of the big shrinkwrap software stores in the UK try to get out of doing this if they can. Just be persistent.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
Nice, you invented the concept of thievery@home. I imagine a print out of lots of vista keys with "wow!" written at the side of one...
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.