[Joe Forster/STA]

Everything is crackable, including dongles.

If you read some .NFO files by some cracker groups, you'll note that one of the conditions for applying for membership is the ability to crack commercial copy protections like dongles. So, I'm sure there are more or less automatic unprotectors/decrypters for commercial dongle-based protection, they're just not public (guess why).

Today's games show how serious copy protections can become. However, at this level of intrusion, they cannot be used for commercial applications because noone would buy them (they cause minor/major stability and security problems). So, application developers are stuck with more compatible but easier-to-crack solutions, e.g. dongles.

If you ask me, there's a very natural idea for a dongle, which wouldn't be that much expensive to manufacture and it would be very hard to crack; rather, the dongle would have to be re-manufactured instead but that's not easy either. The idea would be to make the dongle e.g. compute some function - or do something else - that is time-consuming anyway (so the time of the PC-dongle communication is not a problem) and the result is made use of (!!!). Emulate that!