C# / .NET crack safetySolved

Hi,

I'm considering to use your LimeLM for our products. The idea is to have year licenses for the software. In LimeLM I plan to have additional license field with the license expiration date and some other fields to enable certain features of the software.

My question is, how safe/crack-proof the LimeLM actually is. Because if I add the TurboActivate.cs, the hacker might not see the dll, but after using some Reflector or any other .NET decompilation tool it's quite easy to see all the LimeLM registration code (and probably quite easy get rid of the activation). Is there some recommendation I can follow to actually protect the software? Because "isGenuine = gr == IsGenuineResult.Genuine;" doesn't seem like a safe option.

Mike

Nothing can stop cracking. A full article explaining how easy it is to crack every piece of software: https://wyday.com/limelm/features/why/

There are companies that claim they can stop cracking. They're lying to get your money.

As explained in the third paragraph in that article: "The point of licensing isn't to stop crackers from cracking your software. The point of licensing is to increase your revenue by preventing casual piracy (using serials over and over again). There is real money to be made by stopping casual piracy."

Of course you're right, if the hacker is determined, eventually he'll succeed. But that doesn't mean, we should develop our software to be "hack-able" by simple codeproject tutorial. And "if (IsGenuine) " protection it's exactly that.

Anyway, I hear your answer, LimeLM doesn't care about actually protecting the code. Are at least the feature fields somehow hashed/encrypted using the serial keys when stored locally or requested from LimeLM server?

>> "Of course you're right, if the hacker is determined, eventually he'll succeed."

They're all trivially easy to break. Even the "most advanced" anti-crack "technology".

We've considered publishing videos showing this, but it's a legal grey area. When companies that are vehement about how great their "anti-crack" garbage is gets pushed by us to commit to giving us permission to publish a video showing how easy it is to crack, they go silent. They make claims that, when challenged, fall apart (and quite easily).

This story has played over and over again with multiple different companies.

Long story short: all "anti-crack" methods are snake oil. Don't waste your time or money on them. They're all easy to crack.

>> "Anyway, I hear your answer, LimeLM doesn't care about actually protecting the code."

If it were possible, we would do it. It's not possible.

>> "Are at least the feature fields somehow hashed/encrypted using the serial keys when stored locally or requested from LimeLM server?"

Yes, described in this article: https://wyday.com/limelm/features/why/

Activation data is cryptographically-signed on our activation servers and encrypted in-transit. Meaning a user can't just edit a file and change the license fields.

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