I've been setting up a WinXP PC for old games (Command & Conquers, etc) and re-discovered the "Fighting 4 FUN" multi-keygens (hundreds of EA games in a single 100KB-ish keygen)
Classic. I think the latest multikeygen had 214 games? It's the largest one in the my collection. Fun fact, the older iterations of the keygen had different music![0]
The private key was small but I suppose it was considered adequate at the time of release; it was cracked a long time ago (late 2009 was when I first learned of it) and an earlier keygen exists. Stuff like this tends to remain private/hard-to-discover, but I'm not surprised to see it publicised now.
That forum post is an uncredited reprint of the years-earlier MSKey Readme[1], a brief history of which I've outlined in the first footnote on this blog post[2].
It's so odd to me that people are trying to RE an executable here. Like if I cracked a crypto system just for community credit I'd rather blog the algorithm than release a closed source executable. Seems to happen a lot in these cracking communities though.
If I remember correctly, MSKey4in1 (or one of the other keygens with similar functionality) was released with source code, but in general, you said it yourself: after all, "cracking communities" are effectively people who don't need source code to understand or modify software.
The one person (Empress) that knows how to crack Denuvo refuses to share any details, and I think they recently had some kind of mental breakdown and will no longer be making any new game patches.
Yes and yes (even without the source code) --- after all, cracks did exist for XP (and every version of Windows before and after it.)
The creation of a keygen, which doesn't require any modifications to the original software, is mainly for the challenge of doing so, and now that XP is out of support, historical/archival purposes.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 90.0 ms ] threadAll kidding aside, this looks like a fork or reimplementation for the tool that got popular recently, based on a blog post from a few years back.
The music is delightful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE2uyF4PzNI
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwWB4TbGUCo
Here's some more details:
https://sabah.forumotion.com/t333-all-you-need-to-know-about...
The key phrase is at the end: "Therefore, the complexity of computing the private key k is O(2^31)"
[1] https://bbs.kanxue.com/thread-10032.htm
[2] https://tinyapps.org/blog/202304230700_xp_wpa.html
Couldn't someone just modify it to remove the key check?
The creation of a keygen, which doesn't require any modifications to the original software, is mainly for the challenge of doing so, and now that XP is out of support, historical/archival purposes.