by Fravia+, MSRE, May 1997
URL or url (2012 -> \\borland\brw\)
In this short essay I will show you how quickly you can individuate (and eventually crack) a protection scheme, or any other feature of a Windows 32 bit program using BRW, Borland Resource Workshop, a mighty tool.
As "target" I have chosen for this essay a relatively "old" version of Ultraedit32, By Ian Mead: Version 3.10a, from 1996. Should be easy to find through the archies. Ultraedit is a fairly accettable text editor, which has also hex mode editing, unix text mode conversion and other useful utilities. I'm not pirating anything at all of course: I have used the program (in order to crack it) only one day out of the 45 allowed and have since deleted it from my hard disk, since I did not found it worth 30 dollars (I prefer other -much more old and much more powerful- programs for editing files). BTW I may add that on my computer you would not find a single pirated copy of software: there is no need for this! First of all I have a job, therefore if I really like and find really useful a program (which happens very seldom) I can afford to buy it, as I did with wdasm for instance; secondly, when I need something, I simply and quickly fetch the last version of it ftpmailed from the web (why download when you can ftpmail?). I crack the eventual protection, of course, and yet I use the program mostly for less days than the allowed time (because usually this is more than enough to get already to the date of release of the next version :-)
This program has an annoying "delayed" nagscreen at the beginning, a registration option of the usual name-code comparison algorithm and a "Cinderella" type of protection, set at 45 days.
Obviously we could have easily and quickly cracked the nagscreen using +ORC's dead listing technique:
And we would also have quickly found the Cinderella protection as well, using the same method:
BTW, I checked the more recent 4.3 version of Ultraedit: the protection scheme is the same crap (lazy programmers):
But the aim of this essay is not to crack such a banale protection, but to teach you how to use ANOTHER powerful reverse engineering tool, very useful for windows programs disassembly: the "magical" BORLAND RESOURCE WORKSHOP. I believe that a short digression about this tool is very well worth it: The Whitewater Resource Toolkit, that came with Borland C++ 4, was a phantastic tool for windows (16 bit) 3.1 disassembling already, as all real crackers know. Alas, the development died! In 1994 appeared the last known version of it, ported to 32 bit and in the mean time called "Borland Resources Workshop" (Version 4,5 for Borland C++ 4,5, the one you should fetch).
Unfortunately this tool was TOO powerful and too good, so they of course simply killed it. Whitewater was on this purpose, bought by Symantec (Peter Norton) and the product was no more commercialized. Version 4,5 (GET IT!) is the last one I could find on the net, probably Borland had in 1994 still some rights on its code and was able to publish it, alas for the last time. It's a weird world, isn't it? Awful stupid and useless programs are updated every two months and this real (and very powerful) Juwel has been purposedly killed! That does not wonder me: as we very well know, they do not wont people to UNDERSTAND how a program works, they want only stupid morons that use their (bugged and poor) applications without questioning, understanding or ameliorating them.
Ok, fetch BRW.zip, it's a zipped 2,5 megabytes file, if you did not buy it (like I did short after this essay: it appeared with THE COMPLETE Borland C++ 4,5, on the CD-ROM of PCPlus n.38, a UK Computer magazine, August 1997 edition) anyway I had it already, thanks to a good miner friend of mine, and now anyway it's vastly available on the web.
This are BRW commands:
And this is the immediate answer from my beloved BRW:
Well what do you think you can do now? You found the nagscreen, so what? You will not believe it: It's so easy that its scares me: just choose BRW option "DELETE" (YES!) and simply DELETE dialog 110... BRW recompiles the target on the fly and opla! There is no nagscreen there any more! The target runs without annoying us!
Unbelivable? Try it... See? Now you begin to understand why BRW development has been deemed "not allowed" :-)
You can apply of course the same trick to EVERY PROGRAM of this planet. As a matter of fact BRW is great fun for modifying all your software as you fancy, allowing you quite a palette of options, from puerile to serious reverse engineering of applications you do not have the source code of... My copy of MS-Exchange, for instance, has (obviously) "Micro$oft" with the $ sign and "Fravia's own" all over it, various new functionalities that I have added and no secret whatsoever any more for me (BRW-recompiling is easy if you do not add functionalities and code and just hold to the same length of bytes... if you add code and patch yor targets you should use BRW AND a good recompiler at the same time). I leave to the brain and the mood of the reader to imagine what a good combination between dead listing, eventual Winicing and BRWing windows 32 applications can offer us :-):
TOTAL MASTERY OF ANY APPLICATION; INFINITE POSSIBILITIES OF RESTRUCTURING APPLICATIONS; IMMEDIATE DISCOVERY OF ANY BACKDOOR, HIDDEN TREASURE, ABORTED FUNCTIONS INSIDE ANY PROGRAM... and many many other related goodies.
And since this awful stupid Windows95/97/NT Os will -illogically but unfortunately- spread and spread more and more, all future programs are -at least for a pretty long time being- at your feet as well as at mine, my dear fellow crackers :-)
Well, what d'you say? Did you like Fravia's little contribution to the cause? later Fravia, MSRE (master of software reverse engineering :-)
Post scriptum: I have been criticized for this, a reader telling me that in fact there are new versions of BRW...
"Resource Workshop wasn't killed as you state. Borland still offers it, but it has stopped being a stand alone product from them. Instead it is included in Borland c++... Your conclusions are false"
And yet the best (stripped) version of it I could find or gather until now, even writing to Borland, is still version 4,5. If anyone has any newer version, please notify... but check first that it really is a "development" of BRW, not just another copy of what we already know. (The reader above apologized...)