How secure are Hardlocks/ Dongles really??

[G-Dorion]

Hey folks,
I gotta develope some schoolwork about Hardlock or dongles, mainly USB, for a computer science course.
So I did some research on the web n I read everywhere that those USB-keys are really secure and cannot possibly be cracked. So that there is no way to bypass or copy them.
Now I'd like some info from the "other side".
What do you know about them? Has anyone ever tried on one of those?? U ever heard of anything, or anyone who tried succesfully or not???
Really any Information could be useful.
Thank u very much

G-Dorion

[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!

[TippeX]

dongles can be more secure than software solutions, but it all relies on the implimentation of the dongle, a dongle that just sends the same data on an inquiry is very easily emulated, if the software just does a simple dongle check and doesn't do anything further after the check passes (ie: one check, then continue) then that part of the code can be cracked, some dongles can be dumped/interrogated, some cant, but in essence it goes along with the concept that a hardware solution is better than a software one, which i kind of agree with. that and there are less dongle crackers around than there are software crackers etc.. all in all its a better option but fundamentally relies on the implimentation of the dongle check within the software

[G-Dorion]

Thank you very much so far,
that about the membership for Cracker groups is really interesting. I'm surely going to put that into my work.
The work is for next Monday, so plz keep posting if you know anything!
Thx
G-Dorion

[kosmiq]

Dongles can be very safe (as TippeX said). Something for you to look at would be the cracking of Cubase SX3 by H20 (derilium) and the hard work required there to crack the USB dongle.

It took them a looong time to succesfully crack it. They had to write an emulator emulating the dongle. You can take a look at some of the story in the original nfo (is avaible on various nfo posting sites).

Hardware dongles really are safe and could in a near future be almost impossible to crack/emulate at all.