• 520@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    They can detect that too - at least, they can detect the common software. You might be able to do it with a custom QEMU setup but good luck guaranteeing that for your exam.

    • vettnerk@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I used to be a reseller of this highly specialized navigation software. The licensing was handled via hardware fingerprinting of the harddrive. I’m not 100% sure on how it worked, but it grabbed some raw data off of the boot device, and from that generated a fingerprint. This fingerprint was then sent to the guys who made the software, and they would then send us a license key and a hefty bill. The license key only worked with syatems running off of that particular harddrive. If a customer had a harddrive failure, we had to send them the actual harddrive for them to verify, so they would issue a free key to whichever replacement drive was used.

      I did a lot of experimenting with that software. It was linux based and very tweakable, but the licensing part of it was a bit of a mystery. I managed to crack it through some surprisingly simple out-of-the-box thinking, but one limitation I could never figure out how to circumvent was its refusal to generate a fingerprint from virtual drives.

      For starters, it only worked with drives registering as /dev/hdX or /dev/sdX. Anything outside of that and it wouldn’t generate a fingerprint.

      This was especially frustrating when a well-paying customer offered a nice bonus if we could install it on a macbook for him. After a few days of tweaking I managed to install and run it, only to discover that fingerprinting the drive couldn’t be done due to the device node being/dev/nvmeSomething. And after avfew more days of hacking I managed to fake that too, and they outright refused to issue a license due to them not wanting to support our unofficial hacks.

      Where was I going with this? Oh, right, vmware… i never managed to get it to run in vmware. We had this other well paying customer who wanted the ability to alt-tab between the software and Windows. Unfortunately, any fingerprinting done from within vmware, regardless how I set up the storage, resulted in a fingerprint file with no data.

      Fun fact: the software ui was written in raw xlib. I got to know the owner and lead dev fairly well, and he hinted that the codebase was a complete mess to the point where something as simple as an input dialog for a config option I recommended was A LOT of work.

      • 520@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        The easy way involves looking at the devices and drivers you have installed. Things like a VirtualBox display or a SPICE guest driver are dead giveaways. next, they might look at your processor and see if it has as many cores as it should, but that’s more involved.

        • wheeldawg@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Holy shit why is it even getting anywhere near that nosy? I didn’t know it was anything like that. And I even worked for them for a little while.

          • 520@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Holy shit why is it even getting anywhere near that nosy?

            Because it also serves as an anti-cheat…in the most literal sense. It is trying to make sure students can’t cheat by having other things open like answer pages or Google.

              • 520@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                The qualifications industry is heavily reputation based. If they get a reputation for letting cheaters slide, their reputation tanks among employers and therefore no one will want that qualification.

                And these qualifications are expensive as hell too.