Fetian Rockey Reverse Engineering
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The development of neuroscience-based control methodologies and their integration with the high-lift unsteady hydrodynamics of control surfaces inspired.
A dongle is a small piece of hardware that connects to a laptop or desktop computer.[1] It is a portable device and is often close to the appearance of a USB flash drive. Although earlier use of dongles was to authenticate a piece of software, the word dongle is now widely used to refer to a broadband wireless adapter [2][3] or in general to connectors that translate one type of port to another. The term dongle can also refer to audio recording connectors.
Electrically, the authentication dongles mostly appear as two-interface security tokens with transient data flow that does not interfere with other dongle functions and a pull communication that reads security data from the dongle. These are used by some proprietaryvendors as a form of copy protection or digital rights management, because it is generally harder to replicate a dongle than to copy the software it authenticates. Without the dongle, the software may run only in a restricted mode, or not at all. Despite being a hardware device, dongles are not a complete solution to the trusted client problem. When using a dongle, it is necessary to emphasize the importance of making sure there is enough bandwidth to successfully run applications.
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History
In 1980, WORDCRAFT became[citation needed] one of the earliest programs to use a software protection dongle. Its dongle was a simple passive device that supplied data to the pins of a Commodore PET's external cassette port in a predetermined manner. This was possible because the PET cassette port supplied both power and data connections through a proprietary edge connector. It did, however, make the cassette port unusable for its intended purpose.
The two-cubic-inch (32 cm³) resin-potted first generation device was called a 'dongle' by the inventor, in the absence of a suitable term. The distributor, Dataview Ltd., then based in Colchester, UK, then went on to produce a derivative dongle, which became their core business.
Dongles rapidly evolved into active devices that contained a serial transceiver (UART) and even a microprocessor to handle transactions with the host. Later versions adopted the USB interface in preference to the serial or parallel interface. The USB interface is gradually becoming dominant.
Interestingly, modern smart cards present the same feature set as modern dongles. Given this, the dongle market may be overtaken by smart cards, as smart cards are more secure and powerful by design than traditional MCU based dongles. Some dongle vendors are producing one-chip dongles, which combine the smart card and the smart card reader in the same chip. This structure makes a smart card dongle easy and stable.
A 1992 advertisement for Rainbow Technologies (now SafeNet—a dongle vendor in the U.S) claimed the word was derived from the name 'Don Gall'. Though untrue, this has given rise to an urban myth. (See, e.g., advertisement in Byte Magazine, August 1992, p. 133).
In 2007 travellers to Kenya were in search of a wireless internet device. A USB device was shown to them in which one of the travellers (CHAD MARTZ) referred to the device as a 'Dongle' which began a nation wide marketing of the word 'dongle' in order to promote the wireless device.[citation needed]
During 2008 to 2009, due to the financial crisis, some big actions were taken in dongle area. Aladdin first bought Eutron, a European dongle vendor before 2008. Six months later, Aladdin was acquired by SafeNet. After this transaction, Rainbow (SafeNet), Aladdin (HASP) and Eutron merged to a single entity.
Copy protection
Vendors of software-protection dongles (and dongle-controlled software) often use terms such as hardware key, hardware token, or security device instead of dongle, but the term 'dongle' is much more common in day-to-day use.
Usage
Efforts to introduce dongle copy-prevention in the mainstream software market have met stiff resistance from users. Such copy-prevention is more typically used with very expensive packages and vertical market software, such as CAD/CAM software, MICROS Systems hospitality and special retail software, Digital Audio Workstation applications, and some translation memory packages. The vast majority of printing and prepress software, such as CtP workflows, requires dongles.
In cases such as prepress and printing software, the dongle is encoded with a specific, per-user license key, which enables particular features in the target application. This is a form of tightly controlled licensing, which allows the vendor to engage in vendor lock-in and charge more than it would otherwise for the product. An example is the way Creo licenses Prinergy to customers: When a computer-to-plate output device is sold to a customer, Prinergy's own license cost is provided separately to the customer, and the base price contains little more than the required licenses to output work to the device.
Well-known software-protection dongle manufacturers include SafeNet (Rainbow before an acquisition), Aladdin (acquired by SafeNet), WIBU-SYSTEMS, Matrix (Matrix Dongle), Microcosm Ltd (Dinkey Dongles), SG-Lock, Feitian Technologies, UniKey (or SecuTech), Senselock (or Sense), SPYRUS, Inc. (Rosetta USB, Hydra PC), and MARX (CRYPTO-BOX). In the digital audio world, some versions of Pro Tools and many plugins use the Pace iLok Smart Key USB dongles.
USB dongles are also a big part of Steinberg's audio production and editing systems, such as Cubase, Wavelab, Hypersonic, HALion, and others. The dongle used by Steinberg's products is also known as a Steinberg Key. The Steinberg Key can be purchased separately from its counterpart applications and generally comes bundled with the 'Syncrosoft License Control Center' application, which is cross-platform compatible with both Mac OS X and Windows.
Some software developers use traditional USB flash drives as software license dongles that contain hardware serial numbers in conjunction with the stored device ID strings, which are generally not easily changed by an end-user. A developer can also use the dongle to store user settings or even a complete 'portable' version of the application. Not all flash drives are suitable for this use, as not all manufacturers install unique serial numbers into their devices. Although such medium security may deter a casual hacker, the lack of a processor core in the dongle to authenticate data, do encryption/decryption, and execute inaccessible binary code makes such a passive dongle inappropriate for all but the lowest-priced software. A simpler and even less secure option is to use unpartitioned or unallocated storage in the dongle to store license data. Common USB flash drives are relatively inexpensive compared to dedicated security dongle devices, but reading and storing data in a flash drive are easy to intercept, alter, and bypass.
Issues
There are potential weaknesses in the implementation of the protocol between the dongle and the copy-controlled software. It requires considerable cunning to make this hard to crack. For example, a naive implementation might simply define a function to check for the dongle, returning 'true' or 'false' accordingly, but the dongle requirement can be easily circumvented by modifying the software to always answer 'true'. Best benny's car to buy gta online after hours.
Modern dongles include built-in strong encryption and use fabrication techniques designed to thwart reverse engineering. Typical dongles also now contain non-volatile memory — key parts of the software may actually be stored and executed on the dongle. Thus dongles have become secure cryptoprocessors that execute inaccessible program instructions that may be input to the cryptoprocessor only in encrypted form. The original secure cryptoprocessor was designed for copy protection of personal computer software (see US Patent 4,168,396, Sept 18, 1979)[4] to provide more security than dongles could then provide. See also bus encryption.
However, security researchers warn that dongles still do not solve the trusted client problem: if you give a user the cryptographicciphertext, the algorithm and the key, your cipher will still be breakable, even with the algorithm and key encoded in hardware.[5]
In counterfeit versions of a program, the code to check for a dongle is often deleted or circumvented. As a result, the counterfeit version may be easier to use and thus may seem preferable to the original.
Hardware cloning, where the dongle is emulated by a device driver, is also a lethal threat to traditional dongles. To thwart this, some dongle vendors adopted smart card product, which is widely used in extremely rigid security requirement environments such as military and banking, in their dongle products.
Dongle drivers bring problems for end-users. Most developers and software vendors want to get rid of the dongle driver headache. There are some driverless dongles on the market, which make the protection easy for both software vendors and end-users.
A more innovative modern dongle is designed with a code porting mechanism, meaning you can transfer part of your important program code or license enforcement into a secure hardware environment (such as in a smart card OS, mentioned above). An ISV can port thousands of lines of important computer program code into the dongle.
Feitian Rocky Reverse Engineering Company
The Real time dongle contains an internal real time clock, independent from the Operating system clock, and designed for software vendors who need to control and manage rental and sale usage and/or maintenance. This allows pay per use by charging the end users timely and periodically for actual periods of use. This function is based on a real time clock in the dongle which records the specific time (hour, minute, second) and date (day, month, year). If there isn't a battery inside the dongle, it is not a real time dongle. There are only two real time dongles, one is the HASP Time, and the other one is the UniKey Time.
Game consoles
Some unlicensed titles for game consoles used dongles to connect to officially licensed cartridges, in order to circumvent the authentication chip embedded in the console.
With the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo DS Lite having a slot that can accommodate Game Boy Advance games, a few DS games have used this GBA slot to allow interaction between DS games and GBA games while both are plugged in. Since in this case the DS game is running and the GBA game is simply serving in a read-only capacity (the player may sometimes use data from the GBA game, but cannot actively play it in this mode), many people refer to the GBA game plugged in as the 'dongle' game. This is notably used in the popular Pokémon Diamond and Pearl games. The Nintendo DSi does not have a GBA game slot, which means it cannot be used in the same way as the original DS or the DS Lite, a decision that was highly controversial.
Other hardware
The term 'dongle' has been generalized to refer to things that are structurally different than connectors that translate one type of port to another — for example, an 8P8C modular jack that plugs into the edge connector on a PC Card or ExpressCardEthernetadapter (shown at right). These are sometimes called 'pigtails' — a term that traditionally refers to a short cable with a connector at one end and bare leads at the other, but has also been generalized to refer to a very short patch cable. Similarly, a dongle with one connector on one end and multiple connections on the other is also called a breakout cable.
Dongle may also mean a small active device such as a USB flash drive or a wireless networking adapter. Douglas Adams, in a 1990s column for the US edition of MacWorld magazine, used the term 'little dongly things' to describe converters for adapting US power cables to international plugs.[6] However, these broader usages are not universally accepted.
It is also used by Stephen Fry in the radio series The Dongle of Donald Trefusis to refer to a USB flash drive.[7]
Manufacturers
- Microcosm Ltd -- Dinkey Dongles
- SafeNet Inc.-Aladdin -- Hardlock, HASP
- KEYLOK -- KEYLOK-II, Fortress
- MARX Software Security GmbH
- Okyanus Bilisim Teknolojileri - O-Key Dongle
- Senselock Data Security Center
Popular culture
- The term dongle is used in the first season of the popular web series 'Red vs. Blue' produced by Roosterteeth, although in their reference, they are referring more specifically to a switch, and not the exact definition
- The term dongle is also used in season three of the web series 'Red Vs. Blue' when the main character Church asks a computer if it knows any jokes, to which the computer replies 'Pull my dongle'
- A 'dongle bomb' was a recurring device in the Adventures of Jetman, a cartoon strip in the 1980s computer magazine, Crash.[8]
See also
References
- ^ According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first printed reference is from a Jan 1982 MicroComputer Printout Vol 2:19, 'The word ‘dongle’ has been appearing in many articles with reference to security systems for computer software.' (refers to alleged coinage in 1980)
- ^BBC NEWS Technology 'Dongle' links to web
- ^Huawei unwraps 21Mb/s HSDPA dongle
- ^US Patent 4,168,396
- ^Attacks on and Countermeasures for USB Hardware Token Devices (PDF), Joe Grand, Grand Ideas Studio, Proceedings of the Fifth Nordic Workshop on Secure IT Systems Encouraging Co-operation, Reykjavik, Iceland, October 12–13, 2000, pp 35–57, ISBN 9979-9483-0-2
- ^'DNA/Dongly Things'. Douglasadams.com. http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html. Retrieved 2009-10-29.
- ^'The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry - The Dongle of Donald Trefusis - Episode 3 now available'. Stephenfry.com. http://www.stephenfry.com/dongle/. Retrieved 2009-10-29.
- ^Adventures of Jetman - Crash - Issue 20
External links
- Word does not appear at dictionary.cambridge.org as of 05:30, 11 October 2009 (UTC)
Has anyone else experienced this after updating their devices to 12.3 and have Advanced Protection Program (APP) turned on? I have a Feitian Bluetooth key paired to my account which is similar to the Titan Keys that Google is recalling. A few days ago I was trying to add my Google account to my iPad and it kept failing over and over in the Smart Lock app that the Bluetooth key interacts with.
In Google's security blog it implies to not upgrade to 12.3 because the Titan Key will stop working and to stay on 12.2 until the replacement arrives. Since it's nearly identical to the Feitian key that Google used to recommend when enrolling in APP I'm guessing it's also affected and being blocked by Google for logging in. Searching on Amazon the Feitian key is no longer available, almost like they've pulled the product listing.
Feitian doesn't really have a support page but I'm tempted to reach out and see if they are offering replacement devices with updated firmware.
Edit: Called Feitian and they have started a replacement program. The link to get a replacement: https://www.ftsafe.com/replacement/