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From: maniac@cleanhead.cs.unlv.edu (Eric J. Schwertfeger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Copy protection (was Re: Awesome! No I am Pi**ed!) (LONG)
Message-ID: <1990Dec9.203048.7679@unlv.edu>
Date: 9 Dec 90 20:30:48 GMT
References: <BK.90Nov29222757@tadtec.uucp> <JKH.90Dec3092012@bambam.pcs.com> <1990Dec5.041002.453@sbcs.sunysb.edu> <1990Dec5.205822.216@evax.arl.utexas.edu> <1366@ucsvc.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
Sender: news@unlv.edu (News User)
Reply-To: maniac@cleanhead.cs.unlv.edu (Eric J. Schwertfeger)
Organization: UNLV Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Lines: 33


) 1. I've not seen or heard of pirated versions of Superbase for the Amiga. I
)    believe that this program is dongle protected. {I do not use and hence I
)    do not seek out pirated s/w so I may be merely ignorant of the facts of
)    the matter here.}
) 
)    Question{s}: is it very easy (or hard) to overcome dongle protection?
) 
) 2. If a decryption scheme was placed into a dongle device with a CPU it may
)    be possible (although I cannot think of a way) to execute the decrypting
)    code from the "dongle" and to not allow tracing of the code.  {I believe
)    this would be way too slow for practical use however it illustrates the
)    question I am thinking of phrasing.}
) 
)    Question: if one has decryption code that does not reside in Amiga RAM
)    (and hopefully not accessible by an Amiga run program) is it necessary
)    to have all of the *decrypted* program reside in AmigaRAM?
) 

	1)  Yes, I've seen pirated SuperBase.  It's done by making your
own dongle, which was so simple that I couldn't believe it when I was 
first told how.

	2)  the one problem to #2 is "how does the dongle know what 
program is accessing it?"  Imagine a program that feeds the encrypted
input of a program to a dongle, then saves the decrypted output.

	3)  It`s possible if you supply your own ram card, but now we're
getting too expensive for normal software.


-- 
Eric J. Schwertfeger, maniac@jimi.cs.unlv.edu