Hey cool new colors!

Okay in my relatively short reversing days, I've been hearing the word "dongle" a lot...What exactly is this? I've heard they are a difficult protection scheme of some sort...Could anyone give me more details, or an example of one?

Also, what exactly does an unpacker do?? I've been hearing about these also

thnx,and lets keep the newbie forum going strong!
--ThRaX

Hola,

First off, dongles are a piece of hardware that you plug into one of the ports on your computer. Some software manufacturers ship these with their products to make sure that the software stays on only one computer. Depending on how the programmer implements the protection, you may be able to patch a few jumps, but more often you'll have to emulate the dongle. Some programs are even actually driven by the dongle itself. See zencrack2.cjb.net for more info. CrackZ is pretty slick when it comes to dongles (he's revamping his site ATM, so I don't know if it's back up yet)

As for unpackers, they "unpack" a program (obviously) ;-)

What this means is that a program has been packed, and is unpacked at runtime. Disassembly of the packed .exe is pretty much useless, so you unpack it and save the unpacked copy of the .exe. You can then usually proceed as normal. A simplistic (and somewhat inaccurate) analogy is that packed proggies are somewhat like .zip files.

Hope that helps ya a little

Try litespeed.org i think that is Crackz new home,i came across it the other night

Hi Thrax,
Not sure about dongles
theres a url might help u understand
unpackers
http://users.supernet.com/dharp/files/UnpackFAQ.html
cheers

esther