Steve Fosdick wrote:
On Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:37:25 +0000 James Bensley jwbensley@gmail.com wrote:
I would of guessed not without knowing the algorithm used to generate the key, time to get your reverse engineering hat on!
Work out what kind of hash/encryption is used first, and then I don't know, use the date+time+MAC_ADDRESS+MoBo_Serial# and see what you come up with etc etc
This has got me wondering how many unique ID numbers there are in a machine that could be used in this particular calculation.
There are various methods available, most of which can be faked or are otherwise not always reliable.
From the top of my head as follows.
CPUID serial, P3 and above. Not trivial to fake afaik but can be disabled in the BIOS of the host.
Volume ID's/UUID's. Trivial to fake, even accidentally when using disk images sometimes. MS themselves offer a free tool to change volume ID's
Ethernet MAC address. dependent on there being a network interface, causes issues if the interface is changed/upgraded, easy to rewrite at a software level, possibly not so easy to rewrite at a hardware level.
Other serialisation, so on Windows you could key against the OS's product key which is available from the registry.
TPM module (if available and enabled in the BIOS)
anyone want to add stuff I have no doubt forgotten ?