Software Cracking: An Exploration of the Physical Realities of Software

Most modern software companies are expected to roll out software applications which are both very useful and user-friendly. Commonly, these companies implement Digital Rights Management measures to prevent their product from being “cracked.” However, software DRM is difficult to implement because of the modern, abstract consideration of software and the close relationship between assembly and machine code. A clever cracker may exploit this relationship to remove, skip or otherwise damage the integrity of validation measures. This paper presents a high-level consideration of this concept and some related ideas. Additionally, this paper presents an implementation of a basic method of software cracking using an assembly debugger as an illustration of its points. Related results and discussions are also presented.