![]() ![]() This sounds simple but really involved doing a brute force attack on the dongle to guess the provider and dongle ID. These worked roughly like this: a free tool would read out the dongle data. Here the dongle check was simply patched. Then there were the normal cracks of the software, which would work only for one specific version. Without even knowing how to use the software itself. Apart from the easier crack elaboration, it would be quite universal! If you knew how to tweak one vendor daemon, you could probably crack other vendors, too. ![]() This would cover about 80% of all CAD/CAM/CAE cracks. You would then install the unchanged software and have it connect to the cracked license server. The crack consisted in tweaking this check. The vendor daemon is the service that is compiled for a given manufacturer and which checks the license file against the dongle and/or MAC address. Most cracks are based in cracking the specific vendor daemon of FlexLM rather than cracking the software itself. The latter is known as network licensing and the biggest name in the market is FlexLM. Most applications offer single user and multi user licenses. Cracking CAD/CAM/CAE software is an interesting field, too. The usage is monitored by the provider and there is/will be no need for cracks anymore, because these won't give you full access to functionality or the software won't even work. ![]() Dongle will ultimately disappear as software licensing is shifting to subscription models, which are cloud based. It takes thousands of man-years to develop software like NX, Catia, SolidWorks, Inventor, etc. If you don't like dongles and software protection, maintenance and license fees, then just don't use that particular software! In case of CAD/CAM/CAE it is incredible how complex the software is. This should not divert into a copyright discussion: it is what it is! International laws grant copyright and there are business models around this concept. It is only logic that manufacturer of said software want to protect the software against: - Abusive use: customer buys one license but uses many licenses - Illegal copies: companies use the software without purchasing any license - Getting around maintenance contract: company buys one license without maintenance contract but keeps installing the latest version. A software license for a single seat my cost 10.000 Euro up to 50.000 Euro (in our case) or even more. These dongle are still very popular in expensive software licensing, especially in CAD/CAM/CAE applications (I work in this field). Newer version of these dongles do more than that, but due to lack of precise knowledge I won't risk talking about this, in order to avoid false statements. The protected software would periodically check if the correct dongle is attached to the computer. The picture shown here shows some versions (I am not affiliated to this site - just used a quick Google search): These dongles essentially have two keys stored: the manufacturer key (= the individual key of the software provider using the dongle) and the serial number of the key (= the individual key number). They purchased the competing system, HASP, too. Then they became black with a new design and presently they are purple again with yet another design change. It started with blue ones, then purple ones, yellow ones. They then became replaced by USB versions, of which there are several iterations, too. ![]() This dongle shown in the video is a parallel port RAINBOW SENTINEL dongle of the older kind. ![]()
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