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Mihai Christodorescu
Doctoral Candidate
1210 W Dayton St
Office 7372
Madison, WI 53706-1685
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This paper is a result of research work on software protection and is published as Technical Report # 1479 at the Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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Abstract
A common method of enforcing software license terms is for a program to contact another program, called a license server, and ask for permission to run. This project attempts to bypass these license checks in a commercial product through runtime code modification, using the DynInst library.
The programs chosen as victims for this study are Adobe FrameMaker, the Purify family of programs, and MatLab. We successfully bypass the FrameMaker licensing checks, allowing full use of the product when the license server is unavailable. Limitations in DynInst prevent similar results with Purify or MatLab. A set of powerful tools has been developed and used in the process, and their generality should simplify similar license bypassing efforts on other software products.