Coding question

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knighteyes
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Coding question

Post by knighteyes »

Hey Guys and girls

Just a quick coding question is it possible to write an auto self destruct safe guard against someone from pulling a progarm apart ???

Just theory at the momment ....
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Maz
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Post by Maz »

It depends on what do you mean by 'pulling program apart'?

Do you mean that if someone edits the program, it deletes itself?
It would be hard. Nothing prevent's people from stopping the program, and then editing the binaries. And of course, if program is stopped, it cannot monitor whether the files are edited. Surelly one could do a program so, that it for example checks size of the executable, and if it's not correct, then does something (or some checksum or.... ) Anyways, if someone opens the binary and really knows assemply, he could probably find out the check from files, and bybass it. Of course if check is done correctly, spotting it from assemplycode is extremely difficult for most of us.. But of course there's always someone who can do it.

Another thing you should notice is that OS usually protects files being executed.. Therefor you probably really cannot do a program which deletes itself. There should be additional program which would be called to delete the program being 'protected', if it detects some changes. Now deletin the additional program, or just replacing it with program that does nothing would do the trick...
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knighteyes
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Post by knighteyes »

AHh so a secondary program that replaces all the ones with zeros ??? After checking the file size or make up ?
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Post by Maz »

Something like that I suppose. ALthough as I said, it's not bulletproof. In fact, nothing is bulletproof since everything, absolutely EVERYTHING can be turned to assembly, and then reverse engineered. Although it's hard. In fact, it can probably be made harder than writing such a program from scratch, which probably is the goal nowadays.
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