HWID Protection System

[nerrazzuri]

Been learning to code on this few months and saw some pay2cheat websites using HWID protection system. I was wondering how did they code these. I'm trying to learn on how the HWID system is coded. Any source to review with? Been googling for few hours and return with no result, most of the HWID protection system found on google were using Visual Basic instead of Visual C++. A source for an example would be great.

Questions

1. How to generate the unique ID for every computers?

2. How did they host the HWID on the internet?

[Aguila]

1. How to generate the unique ID for every computers?

What do you like? CPU ID, HDD ID, BIOS ID, mainboard ID, network card ID, combination. Maybe you know something else?

2. How did they host the HWID on the internet?

encrypted with a mysql server and a php script is a good idea. You can choose, again, what you like most.

But using online auth is always a risk, because coding a server emu is a nice and mostly easy solution...

[nerrazzuri]

Thanks, do you have any sources or code snippet to generate the ID and to check the ID in VC++?Any ID would be good, I'm just learning.

And I saw that people using a raw text file as database to keep the HWID in a file sharing site.

[Aguila]

I dont have a complete source, but i dont understand why you need something. hardware id check sources are very useless, you should code your own. There are plenty possibilities.

e.g. with the windows apis GetVolumeInformation, GetCurrentHwProfile and GetSystemInfo you can generate a simple hardware id (use msdn to get more infos about them)

even windows itself is storing a hardware id in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Cryptography\ MachineGuid

1. collect computer hardware infos

2. use a hashing algo like md5 or sha1 is recommended

3. store it somewhere, nobody except the program should have access to them

using just a simple server with a txt file to store the IDs is a really bad idea. You dont have any control about them and it is very easy to circumvent the hardware id check.

Edited July 25, 2010 by k11

[nerrazzuri]

Alright, thanks for the information k11. =D