Undeletable autoit compiled exe

[civilcalc]

Or give up filthy capitalism altogether, become a pioneer and release your project as Open Source to the world You'll sleep better, and it'll be great kharma.

Your right it would. But I lost my job when on maternity leave, I have two children and no money. I am facing growing debts, and running out of savings rapidly. I sold some basic software a few years ago, for a few £££, and the feedback ive got from the samples ive sent out have been very positive, with some companies confirming orders based on it. My options are limited, short of selling my dignity I dont have much going for me. Jobs are scarce, and the ones I can do are going to people with recent experience and recent references, and its becoming a very grim circle to get out of.

Edited June 11, 2012 by civilcalc

[trancexx]

New AutoIt works differently. Actually, it's all very simple. Protection is moved away from AutoIt's to user's shoulders.

Protection through obfuscation isn't the way to go, third party executable compressors/protectors are. Your code will be as safe as those tools make it.

[civilcalc]

New AutoIt works differently. Actually, it's all very simple. Protection is moved away from AutoIt's to user's shoulders.

Protection through obfuscation isn't the way to go, third party executable compressors/protectors are. Your code will be as safe as those tools make it.

Can you suggest any good ones?

EDIT, ive found some that are quite reasonable. $150 for a year.

Ill try the demo.

Edited June 11, 2012 by civilcalc

[JohnOne]

Before you do, take a tour of the internet, and see how easily they are plucking your code

from these armour wrappers.

I swear, there are people who spend a lot of time just stealing software for any dim witted

ratbag who goes to their forum and askes them to, I think they get some sort or kudos for it.

[Dana]

As others have pointed out, there is no way to completely protect your software against a determined cracking attack. The best you can do is deter some level of user; what level of user you can deter is related to the effort you put into it.

At one extreme is the user who won't pirate software even if completely unprotected.

Then there are many levels of users who will exercise some level of determination (and skill), but not go to heroic efforts if the purchase price is reasonable.

At the other extreme is the guy who has the determination and skill to crack anything, and does it for the fun of it, and posts it online.

The middle group probably consists of 99% of users. Probably less than 5% of those are likely to have even heard of Autoit, much less have the motivation to try to decompile your code. An equal number might have the motivation to search the internet for a cracked version, and be unafraid of trying a likely virus infected crack. So with simple protection (like an obfuscated program and scheme you proposed) you've only lost at most 90% of potential profits. When you consider that the more secure the protection, the more of a PITA it is for the user (thus also impacting potential sales), it likely balances out, especially for an obscure program that likely won't attract the attention of the third group.

[elektron]

Melba,

Its not an attack on the majority of people here, most are very helpful and I know your posts are some of the best and the mods do a great job. But I made a post about poker last year and got absolutely slaughtered, despite me being very clear I wasnt breaking any rules. Sure enough someone reported it, I got angry, as I expected it, nobody know anything about poker or the point of the post and I got a warning, a thread locked and I felt like shit for ages. I handled it very badly, I over reacted, but it really ruined my week, and I want to avoid it this time before some clueless wannabe trys to point out the obvious to a long time member. Anyway rant over.

Do you have any suggestions, on how I can make the code secure enough that its just too difficult to decompile it.

do the hackers need to know it was written with Au to decompile it? Or are they one stop shops for all decompiling? Can I somehow hide the fact it was written in Au so they dont know what to decompile?

Most people, in general, will be unable to decompile your code. Unless this is a particularly filthy bit of obnoxious civil engineers, I wouldn't worry about the decompiliation part as much as I would about the duplication part. The basic answer is no, you can't.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/261638/how-do-i-protect-python-code#261727

Now, that being said. Disassembly is expensive, especially for compiled executables (ones that are not coded in Java or .NET), because it typically requires the program to be broken into assembly. Anybody that knows enough to do that and is willing to trace the code and find ways to patch it.... well, you get my point.

The next problem that you have to deal with is code injection and debuggers attaching to your program. There are ways to recognize when this is happening, but they don't always work and involve some very heavy DLL calls.

Thirdly, anyone who has physical access to a machine has the ability to compromise it.

There's no easy answer to this.

The best ways, historically, have been to use custom classloaders (programs that run your program, but in protected mode), hardware protection, server licensing schemes, and what not. If it were me, and I really had software that I wanted to protect from being copied, I would encode it onto a PCI device with an AES chip on it that requires a dongle (containing the license to the software) to be connected to the computer at all times to run. Additionally, I would use some kind of write once only memory to store the activation key...

Anyway, good luck in your endeavors.