Qt Reverse Engineering

I was asked a couple months ago by a friend of mine to “tweak†a software protection. As I went in to it, I found the protection scheme very interesting as it involved a couple of cross platforms based engines interacting together to serve as anti-hacking security licensing system. One was Qt, the other being JavaScript. It was the second time that I came against a Qt based software. The first time thought, I just used the basic cracking skills every reverser uses with Windows GDI apps. But this time I needed to go deeper to understand the cross VM interactions, and a bigger understanding of the Qt framework was needed, so, I engaged into searching for more info on the subject. The results were quite poor, except for an article by Daniel Pistelli, who now works at Hex Rays (coincidence that IDA has been reassembled using this framework?).

Besides his article, not much on the subject of reversing Qt code seemed to be around. Since then I was faced with a fair amount of Qt applications, even Portuguese ones, so I decided to post my thoughts on the subject, and build a tutorial for the 4th version of Qt.