A busy week for the courts [LWN.net]

A busy week for the courts

Posted Nov 2, 2004 9:59 UTC (Tue) by pandaemonium (guest, #25802)
In reply to: A busy week for the courts by fergal
Parent article: A busy week for the courts

From a brief look at how things work, one can tell that there must be two seperate CDKey check algorithms.
How I come to this conclusion? It's quite simple.

The first time your CDKey get's checked is when you install the game. So there must be a CDKey check algorithm in the client (or at least the installer software). Now you might happen to have used one of the various (and illegal) CDKey generators that can be found on the web. You can perfectly install the game with such a CDKey and play single player or LAN games.
Now, when you connect to Battle.Net your CDKey is checked a 2nd time. And this time only your valid CDKey from the game's box will pass the check - the one from the CDKey generator will fail (or at least 99.999% of them).

So... What is the conclusion we can make?
There is a CDKey check in the client (or installer) that allows a limited set of CDKeys and there is a check on the Battle.Net servers, that only permits a even more limited subset of those CDKeys.

So the bnetd authors might have been able to reverse the client/installer CDKey check, but what use would it have been of? This check is allready made during install... And without any help from blizzard it's impossible to reverse engineer the check algorithm implemented by the Battle.Net servers themselves...

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