Investigating an early 2000s video game licensing system

This article explores a video game software licensing system from the early 2000s used in a number of video games. The system operated on the basis of ‘electronic licences’, with licensing data directly exchanged between client and server. Despite promises to purchasers of lifetime licences, the software licensing servers have now become inoperative. Obtaining code for static analysis Opening the video game software licensing interface, we see there is an option for a proxy server. By setting the proxy server to a local address, we can intercept the request made by the client: $ nc -l -p 8080 POST http://foobar.example:80/foobar/getlicense.asp HTTP/1.0 HOST: foobar.example:80 CONTENT-TYPE: application/x-www-form-urlencoded ACCEPT: text/html, text/plain CONTENT-LENGTH: 1024 foobar_emsg=AQBiAQAA[...] The request also yields the following error message on the client: This appears to be a native Windows message box. Using x64dbg, we can set a breakpoint on MessageBoxA to see where this…