Zero-Knowledge cracking of a 1983 Apple II Hardware Copy Protection
I have cracked HUNDREDS of copy-protected games and other software in my youth, but all of it was on the IBM PC x86 platform. When a fellow retro-computing collector found a hardware-dongle copy-protected historic Hebrew software for the Apple IIe from 1983, I jumped on the opportunity even though I knew absolutely NOTHING about the computer, its architecture, or operating system. In this talk I'll walk you through my learning process and figuring out things as I go, on my journey to find the copy protection and crack it.
I'll walk the audience through the steps of tackling the problem - understanding what I know (very little) and what I don't know (a whole lot), looking for the tools, creating my own tools, figuring out the Apple IIe boot process and software loading, reversing old-style (no LLM!), finding the protection, bypassing it in the emulator, and later in the disk image. I'll then talk about my efforts to recreate the dongle itself. I will demo on stage parts of the process.
Inbar has been teaching and lecturing about Internet Security and Reverse Engineering for nearly as long as he has been doing that himself. He started programming at the age of 9 and Reverse Engineering at the age of 14. He spent most of his career in the Internet and Data Security field, and the only reason he's not in jail right now is because he chose the right side of the law at an early age.
Inbar specializes in an outside-the-box approach to analyzing security and finding vulnerabilities, using his extensive experience of close to 30 years.