Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: Product activation is exploitable
From: "Kristian Hermansen" <khermansen () ht-technology com>
Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2003 01:43:35 -0400
There is a freely available tool that you can download to see what your "Product Key" really is. Most likely this tool reverses the key from the "Product ID", which is in the registry...but I a not sure (correct me if I am wrong). I tried using Regmon to see what registry keys the tool is querying, but I had no luck. Anyone know how this tool works? I'm sure it is entirely possible to write a nice worm (0-day win sploit + vuln scanner) that grabs prod ids and uploads them to arbitrary locations for later retreival and key reversal. I have no clue as to how windows XP product activation and such work so these are merely guesses. The one thing I don't understand about WPA is the fact that no one really understands the key generation algorithm!!! For any product that accepts user input typed keys, there should be an available keygen (assuming the algorith has been reversed). So why hasn't anyone written one yet? No one reversed it yet? I did manage to find a nice little prog that guesses and finds keys by brute force (takes about 1-20 minutes to generate one valid key), but even this is useless for WPA since activation using these keys results in an error from MS servers stating "Unauthorized Key" (or something like that). WTF??? Does MS really keep track of all the keys they have issued (aka. "whitelist")??? Someone please explain... Kris Hermansen ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rick Kingslan" <rkingsla () cox net> To: "'Geoincidents'" <geoincidents () getinfo org>; <full-disclosure () lists netsys com> Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2003 12:59 AM Subject: RE: [Full-disclosure] Product activation is exploitable
Interesting. But, I'm not sure how effective this would be, as everything that I've looked at (XP, 2003) doesn't have the actual WPA keys in the registry - unless I'm looking in the wrong place (possible). And, unless it's WPA, MS is going to have a tough time shutting anyone else off who is 'suspected' of using a published key. However, there's always shutting off the POWER in your city - that's effective, too. -rtk -----Original Message----- From: full-disclosure-admin () lists netsys com [mailto:full-disclosure-admin () lists netsys com] On Behalf Of Geoincidents Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2003 6:04 PM To: full-disclosure () lists netsys com Subject: [Full-disclosure] Product activation is exploitable So I'm reading this story http://www.nccomp.com/sysadmin/dell.html about a company who laid off their admin and he took all their product keys and posted them on the internet. Well to make a long story short, somehow applying a hotfix caused the software to deactivate (it has to have a deactivation feature or what good is it?) and require activation again
which
of course was impossible since MS shut those numbers down. It got to thinking, what if the dcom worm had grabbed the product key from [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion] "ProductKey"="XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX" or ProductID="XXXXX-OEM-XXXXXXX-XXXXX" and posted it to a dozen random newsgroups? According to the EULA
Microsoft
has the right to shut down every one who becomes infected and compromised
in
this manner. Sure looks like a security issue to me, product activation makes this registry entry which allows all users full read access a dangerous thing
to
have laying around unprotected. Geo. _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
_______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Current thread:
- Re: Anybody know what Sobig.F has downloaded? Brent J. Nordquist (Sep 01)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- RE: Anybody know what Sobig.F has downloaded? Ferris, Robin (Sep 02)
- RE: Anybody know what Sobig.F has downloaded? Nick FitzGerald (Sep 06)
- Product activation is exploitable Geoincidents (Sep 06)
- Re: Product activation is exploitable w g (Sep 06)
- RE: Product activation is exploitable Rick Kingslan (Sep 06)
- Re: Product activation is exploitable Kristian Hermansen (Sep 06)
- Re: Product activation is exploitable Lan Guy (Sep 07)
- RE: Product activation is exploitable Rick Kingslan (Sep 07)
- RE: Product activation is exploitable Justin Shin (Sep 07)
- RE: Anybody know what Sobig.F has downloaded? Nick FitzGerald (Sep 06)
- Re: Product activation is exploitable Geoincidents (Sep 07)
- RE: Product activation is exploitable Rick Kingslan (Sep 07)