I cracked a $200 software protection with xcopy

Summary

disclaimer: this is educational security research only. i do not condone piracy. i purchased a legitimate license for this software and conducted this analysis on my own property. this writeup exists to document protection implementation flaws, not to enable theft. support developers - buy their software. github repo: vmfunc/enigma tl;dr i spent a day analyzing enigma protector - a $200 commercial software protection system used by thousands of vendors. RSA cryptographic signatures, hardware-bound licensing, anti-debugging, VM-based code obfuscation. serious enterprise security theater. then i noticed the protected installer extracts a completely unprotected payload to disk. xcopy /E "C:\Program Files\...\product" .\crack\ that’s the entire crack. copy the installed files. they run on any machine. no keygen needed, no binary patching, no cryptanalysis. $200 protection defeated by a command that shipped with DOS 3.2 in 1986. this is a case study in why threat modeling matters more than fancy cryptography, and why “military-grade encryption” means nothing when you leave the back door wide open. target overview bass bully premium - a VST3 synthesizer plugin. protected by enigma protector, a commercial software protection system that costs $250+ and promises serious security. from their marketing: “Enigma Protector is a powerful tool designed to protect executable files from illegal copying, hacking, modification and analysis.” we’ll see about that. we have one known valid license: Key: GLUJ-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-V99KP3 HWID: 3148CC-XXXXXX Name: Bass Bully our goal: understand the protection and build a proper crack static analysis first, let’s look at what we’re dealing with: import pefile pe = pefile.PE(r"Bass Bully Premium_Installer_win64.exe") print(f"Machine: {'x64' if pe.FILE_HEADER.Machine == 0x8664 else 'x86'}") print(f"Sections: {pe.FILE_HEADER.NumberOfSections}") print(f"Entry Point: 0x{pe.OPTIONAL_HEADER.AddressOfEntryPoint:X}") print(f"Image Base: 0x...