About

CD protection is important today as never before. The widespread use of low-end recorders allowed any user to duplicate discs in almost mass-production quantities . The lions share of existing discs has not been purchased because users simply borrow them from their friends or colleagues. At the same time, most shareware programmers distribute their products on CD-R discs by mail, which considerably complicates the hackers task. If the program is not freely available, how can it be cracked?

As a result, users are interested in cracking protected discs, while developers have the opposite goal, namely, protecting CDs against cracking. This book satisfies the needs of both groups. It explains how to crack practically any currently existing protection software and suggests a range of new protection mechanisms that virtually cannot be cracked.

CD protection against copying contains a large amount of material that has never been published before. It provides the reader with detailed information on CD structure and discloses lots of secrets known only to professionals (and not even to every professional). At the same time, the author tries to present this material in an accessible form, without excessive use of higher mathematics and practically without the use of Assembler language.

Having read this book, the reader (even with no special training) will learn how to create discs that, in principle, cannot be copied because of the hardware limitations of contemporary CD-R/CD-RW recorders. Besides this, the reader will learn how to avoid conflicts with non-standard equipment, as a result of which protection mechanisms refuse to work or, even worse , damage the users equipment.

The book is oriented to the wide spectrum of readers, so the reader doesnt have to have any previous experience or background knowledge. The reader might even lack knowledge of the sector structure of a CD-ROM (by the way, 99 percent of programmers dont know much about this either). All of the information necessary for understanding the principles of CD operation is provided directly in the book, and references to third-party sources are minimal. The reader doesnt need to be a programmer, because all of the required utilities for the analysis, protection and cracking of CDs are supplied along with the book. These copiers, developed by the author, will make all work automatically for the reader. Thus, the book is worth purchasing, if only for of the contents of the companion CD alone.

At the most, the reader must be familiar with mathematics at the University level, know how to use disassembler, and be able to work with C and Assembler programming languages. Of course, reading this book wont make you a guru, but youll still acquire almost unlimited power over CDs and be able to do whatever you like with them.

Notation Conventions

To prevent confusion and at the same time avoid unnecessary verbosity , the book will use several notation conventions, which are briefly outlined below:

• NEC drive _NEC CD-RW NR-9100A, firmware version 1.4

• ASUS drive ASUS CD-S500/A, firmware version 1.4

• TEAC drive TEAC CD-W552E, firmware version 1.09

• PHILIPS drive PHILIPS CDRW2412A, firmware version 1.5

Alcohol 120% an excellent copier of protected CDs, a shareware version of which can be downloaded from http://www.alcohol-soft.com/. This automatically cracks more than half of all currently existing anti-copying mechanisms and allows you to mount images of protected discs dynamically to a virtual CD-ROM drive, which is very convenient for the purpose of experimentation. Unfortunately, only correct images can be mounted, and most images in protected discs cannot be classified as such.

Clone CD a good copier of protected discs, a shareware version of which can be downloaded from http://www.elby.ch/. Copying protected discs in completely automatic mode is, of course, not the strongest point of Clone CD. It could be more accurate to say that it copes with this task poorly. However, after manually tweaking the program settings and the image of the protected disc, it also can copy over half of all existing examples of protection mechanisms. But to say that Clone CD can crack practically any types of protection would be far from accurate.