Hi. Fist I don't intend to say TOO much :-) If I could have edited the title to fix it I would have. If I hadn't thought it trivial I would have bugged an editor.

I am not and have never been a cracker although I am familiar with the techniques of decompiling and with x86 assembler. Before posting the original response I considered the issues of whether chinman was the rightful owner of the intellectual propertry (his scripts) embedded within the .exe generated by PerlApp. Having established to my satisfaction that this was indeed the case I simply greped his scripts out of the exe using a standard method. I did this with the full consent of the owner of the aforementioned scripts. I did not 'reverse engineer' anything, nor was this required. The scripts are plainly identified and easily removed.

The scripts thus reclaimed represented chinman's intellectual property not Active State's. The fact that they were encoded hindered his right to access his own intellectual property. Despite requesting help from Active State they are yet to send so much as an autoresponder message.

The encoding scheme utilised XOR against a key string to generate a simple symetric key shift cipher. This type of cipher was first described by Blaise De Vigenère (1523-1596) so is probably no longer subject to patent issues :-) This type of cipher is a just a glorified caeser shift cipher and can be broken using a number of techniques. Using XOR in this manner to generate a Vigenère cipher is widespread and has been used since before I was interested in computers (late 70s).

So nothing belonging to Active State over which they have any exclusive IP rights has been touched. What has been done is to demonstrate that the task is quite do-able. My question was and remains should it be this easy? If it is then those using PerlApp for pseudo security should be aware of this.

I think this is quite different from breaking the encryption of DVDs - that was naughty and the only foreseeable purpose illegal. It is also difficult to fix given the huge investment in infrastructure. PerlApp in contrast would be easy to fix.

cheers

tachyon

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