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by sneak 839 days ago
I remember the first time I ever cracked an app, I was so convinced I would fail, but it turns out that finding these sorts of easy-to-modify JNE/JEZ spots is easier than it seems. Even if you pick wrong you can just revert to the original file and try a different spot.

I imagine this would be something that AI will be able to do easily in an automated fashion, you can literally just try flipping the JEZ/JNZ in a bunch of candidate spots and launching the app and seeing if the nag screen comes up.

2 comments

Not really an AI problem though: that's just fuzzing. If the fail case is well defined then really all you need to do is prune the candidates down.

Now if AI could crack something like Denuvo in a 0-shot way...

I will say that ChatGPT did a decent job of explaining non-documented instructions in prior attempts of binary patching.

Now if I could feed an AI a binary and have it tell me where what is happening in a very broad scope, that'd be a game changer, and I'd say that's quite attainable with a high-context window LLM as they seemingly understand hex-formatted byte-code quite well.

> Not really an AI problem though: that's just fuzzing

everything is AI these days apparently... even LLMs

Had tools like that already in the 90s, no AI, just brute force.