http://www.idwaneo.com/beta-tester-team-f21/idcrack-beta-v3121-t1060.htm
That kinda sucks. Did you see the note:
We implemented something different for the pirated copy protection that doesn’t cripple the game in anyway - but if piracy can’t be detected then it’s worthless.
Looking like free and ad support is the way forward.
I am just wondering hiw that kind of place if apparently well known from Iphoen dev ^^, can still make their little bizness just well relax front of everybody eyes :roll: …
Maybe it’s price to pay for waht so called “freedom”…good luck with that XD, hoppefully there isn’t million website like that :lol:
Those people are doing evils 
Nevertheless, I have implemented it on our game. Hopefully people will not use this cracker :x
Thats exactly why I’m all in for the trivial solution: apple has finally to prevent jailbroken devices from accessing the app store at all.
They are able to detect jailbroken devices without any question (the in app store problems at the launch showed that pretty straight forward) and I think its finally time to offer us the possibility to react to this treat by allow us to mark / unmark a checkbox when distributing an app: “Not available on jailbroken devices”
If jailbreakers have to break and unbreak their device all the time to do jailbreaks, then they are at least slowed down significantly enough to perhaps piss them off somewhen.
This is unfortunate and also unavoidable. There is nothing that can be done to stop it, so time spent on anti-piracy measures is time that could probably be better spent improving one’s game.
Well, the Idwaneo site is now down, thanks to whomever notified them. They are still putting things on Filestube.
As Kripto already covered though, it is a losing battle. Apple, who should provide some real support in this regard, is completely unwilling to do anything, which means the iPhone is very much an insecure platform for software distribution. Without serious help from Apple, it is just not worth the effort to try and prevent piracy. Rather sad, I know.
That would remove your only hope of getting any money from pirates. If jailbroken devices can’t access the app store, then pirated apps is all they can ever use. IIRC someone posted a blog entry saying that, with a nag screen, they converted 5% of pirates to sales. Just check for a cracked app and nag away. Or show ads. It’s better than making zero bucks.
Granted, crack checking appears to be broken currently. Since all cracked apps lack encryption, maybe you could check the binary itself for the mach-o encryption flag, by reading the first 4096 bytes of the file and checking the flag field of the segment structure. It’s not completely trivial because macho-o load commands are variably sized, so you’d have to parse the header first and follow the load commands to get to the first segment, but I bet it’s doable in Unity script. Of course the easy fix for that check is to simply re-encrypt the binary, or make an encrypted loader segment, but it might buy us a few weeks/months in the epic never-ending struggle.
I keep seeing people telling fighting piracy is a lost cause.
Excuse my optimistic nature, but unless someone tried (or witnessed) all the possible countermeasures, and they all failed, nobody should be able to entitle himself the right to say “You can’t stop piracy”.
And as nobody is omniscient enough to know every possible countermeasures in the world, including the ones that are yet to be discovered, I think the above statement applies to everyone.
Maybe a topic listing all the possible anti-piracy measures and all of their flaws could be enlightening.
The big thing is money, and even with money to fight piracy, it happens. Look at the past decade, of how many big industry entities and small indie artists have tried to stop music pirating. Or companies attempting to stop software pirating. Or game publishers try to use DRM.
There is enough empirical evidence present for someone to claim “You can’t stop piracy.” There are many cases where individuals, organizations, companies, etc have been sued, and sometimes stopped, but the overall world of piracy is not any weaker.
This is like trying to stop all drug use by attempt to get one dealer off the street.
I’m not trying to be pessimistic, or tell you that you shouldn’t do anything, and it’s all futile. But neither should you believe there are one or two secret tricks which will end all piracy. There will be piracy. You need to put in as much protection as you can afford too, and then just accept that fact that a certain amount of people will pirate it.
This is mostly a semantical argument focusing on terms like “all piracy” and “impossible”, but I will humor you anyway. There has always been an implied “economically” in that phrase, so it should be “you cannot economically prevent all piracy”. Supposing one was willing to spend enough money on the technology and had no concerns about how overly invasive DRM would cut into sales, they could make a non-piratable product. As businesses, no publisher is going to spend millions on a DRM-scheme which would basically stop piracy with the side-effect of dropping their revenue to zero.
If you can detect they cracked it to show nag screens only to pirates, then you could have done anything else too.
Problem is that thanks to Apple its just far to easy for them to reach that point (we can’t get valid UUIDs related to accounts who actually bought an app to implement “system lock” alike systems and alike, we can’t delete the app itself on detection of an attempt to crack it so they would have to redownload from store), and the fact that we use a non-source technology with a fixed clearly defined structure does definitely not make the situation any better for us as the places where we hook in our stuff is small enough to even brute force attack it.
At the time there are basically two models protecting themself part of. Thats In App Store and naturally apps that require an online service counterpart
@Tempest JRavey : Oh, I’m ok with economical fighting difficulties, then 
@Dreamora : I’m also blindly confident in inapp purchase protection, as there has been positive reactions from devs.
But two points are making me wonder :
- devs are saying DLC is “less” crackable. I don’t understand, “less” means not fully. Which means there still is a breach, so will it become “fully” crackable in no time, considering pirates activity on the net. So how would it be a solution ?
- Also, if hackers are able to crack full downloaded apps, how could it be impossible to crack downloaded parts of this app ? The main protection is appstore access, which is the same as full apps.
Nothing prevents them from downloading apps+inapp purchases once, and then make a cracked version of the whole thing … ?
I can’t see the magical remedy here :roll:
I haven’t seen anyone say downloadable content is less crackable – if anything, it’s more so. StoreKit is posting HTTP and getting JSON back. Crackers could trap this in the network layer, or in DNS, or by replacing the OpenSSL libs, etc. It won’t be long before there’s a MobileSubstrate plugin for spoofing iTunes Connect (if there isn’t already) for in-app purchases, both purchase and verification. Crackers will simply swap the StoreKit receipts of downloadable content. Your app will get a notification that the user bought something and you’ll give it to them, none the wiser.
Some developers have moved to using their own servers as a go-between when doing receipt verification (i.e post receipt to their server, which then makes the call to itunes to verify the receipt); that would give you the chance to see how often a single receipt / transaction ID was being verified, if nothing else. Although I guess the transaction ID could be forged.
I’d guess there is no magical remedy. Perhaps future devices will have a chip like an XBox, and jailbreakers will need to mod their hardware. That’s about as magical as I can think up, and that’s hardly bulletproof.
Thanks Bliprob.
So, saying that inapp purchase is a valid solution is a mistake ?
I think dealing in absolutes is a mistake.
InApp purchases won’t eliminate 100%, but they do tend to work for some developers. It’s a valid solution in some cases, and an invalid solution in others.
Is it a solution for overcoming app piracy? Doubtful. Maybe in the short term, but probably not forever. But if you focus on the crackers, you’ll drive yourself crazy. Focus on the legit users. Is your in-app content a win for them? Yes? Then yes, it’s totally valid.
(Important aside: I haven’t heard of any actual in-app purchase cracks yet.)
That’s actually making me curious.
Maybe it opens up much better ways to control an app’s validity, as you said with dev servers checking iTUnes purchase.
Added measure can be countered, removed, faked, cracked, whatever. You have unique serial number = cracked algorithm, keygen. You force online registration, and lose money on folks who doesn’t have internet access; or worst… they can strip the part of program that checks online, or fake the server response (which boils down to cracking the algorithm).
Chinese have numerous famous saying for this, Good grows a foot, Evil grows 10 feet. You got your strategy (wall), well I got my ladder. Really… it’s you got your solid bunker, I have my TNT to blow a hole through the wall.
Trend in Chinese game is offer one game, and have them pay you before their account can access the “PREMIUM” features. But even this… can be cracked… you become successful like RO (Ragnork Online) or EQ, WoW, then you start to see Emulated Server, located in China? Sorry… good luck shutting that down .