Altera Software Dongle Teardown

[EEVblog]

Travel back several decades when expensive software was protected by the dreaded parallel port Dongle!

[tszaboo]

Altera has a dongle, which has a bunch of logic chip in it, and not an Altera FGPA.
I know this is a third party tool, but still. I find it hilarious, when companies do this.

[Barny]

The CNC-programming machine Cadman from LVD uses a USB-dongle.
I don't knew why, because you need the machine from LVD to use the program.
But hey, if they need a USB-dongle even you have a big dongle standing in the shop to run the program I have to live with it.

But the most used dongled software is Windows10.
Its dongled to the hardware.

[rsjsouza]

I remember those when I used Max Plus with their dev kit with a 7000 and a Flex 10k on the same board. Matlab, Code Composer, 3DSMax also had this well into the 2000s. What a pain.

(Some folks spent hours with Sourcer and Turbo Debugger to try to reverse-engineer and jump their verification routine).

[Fungus]

I've used Rainbow Tech dongles on my software in the past.

The way they worked was that you sent them a 32 bit number and they encrypted it and sent you the result. The encryption algorithm was configurable at the factory and each dongle was configured to a customer/account.

By comparing the results with known key/response pairs you could tell if the dongle was there or not.

Here's actual code from a program I wrote in the 1990s:

Code: [Select]

unsigned int response;
DoDongleQuery(0xbefa7d57, &response, 0x0c);
if (response == 0xf508f4d3) {
  DongleFound = TRUE;
  return;
}


[lpaseen]

It was 80s or so, and a company that had some high end cad program running on dos with a hw dongle. Don't remember the exact issue but the asked me if it was any way they could skip using the dongle (interfered with the plotter or something) . I expected some tricky stuff but took a look at the code and noticed that was actually two parts, one dongle driver and then the app. The app did a sw interrupt to talk to the dongle driver so it was just a case of replacing the dongle driver with my version that was answering "all is good" to the interrupt.
I was mostly wondering why they put so much effort in to the hw part when the sw part was made so stupid.

[Ice-Tea]

I remember those! I also remember we didn't have enough of them so if you wanted to fire up the IDE you'd first had to hunt down the colleague who stole it (back) from you 

[golden_labels]

It’s not gonna be a microcontroller, ’cause a) they didn’t have the micros with like you know — I don’t see any crystal on here or anything like that — […] with an internal oscillator […]

I wasn’t reverse engineering the board, but it is connected to the LPT port. Not only one can generate square wave with digital data lines, but LPT itself outputs clock signal on the STROBE pin..

[Chipguy]

In 1990 when I was a young apprentice I worked in the engineering department of a former big TV manufacturer. One engineer was using this Quartus Software on a 386DX-16. The company bought this software but some colleagues reverse engineered this dongle and replaced the logic with: One ALTERA EPLD 

I rmember seening a PLCC jobbie used in one self built dongle.
They used a Dolch Logic Analyzer to reverse engineer it and the Altera software to reproduce the logic.

Unfortunately I don not have no contact to any of them anymore. As I said it was 29 years ago.
So the answer is yes. Someone has reverse engineered this back in the day when it was useful.

[orion242]

We still on occasion use some old software for programing control systems that uses a sentinel hardlock.  PITA.  Anyway after playing the game for a decade or more, it "became known" that the software was checking for a windows environment variable at startup.  If one just added and set this specific variable to "NO_STINKING_DONGEL" (not joking), goodbye dongels.

[Fungus]

Anyway after playing the game for a decade or more, it "became known" that the software was checking for a windows environment variable at startup.  If one just added and set this specific variable to "NO_STINKING_DONGEL" (not joking), goodbye dongels.

Obviously put there by the developers after they get fed up of all the dongle crap.

[orion242]

Without a doubt.  And the fact they hated it so much they put this option in, I didn't think twice about tossing them all in the trash after finding it.  The parasites even charged a fortune to trade in from parallel to USB model.  It was a whole cult that knew which specific ISA or USB parallel adapter would work with the stupid thing as time marched on.  Arghh the agony of the "dongle"

[glarsson]

If one just added and set this specific variable to "NO_STINKING_DONGEL" (not joking), goodbye dongels.

Just like the Rigol "-fullopt" command line option.

[BrianHG]

Travel back several decades when expensive software was protected by the dreaded parallel port Dongle!

OMG, I just shot mine in the garbage about a year ago.

[Halcyon]

Software dongles are very much still around!

In my industry, we actually have dedicated "dongle servers" which are rack mount appliances with many USB ports. Each port houses a dongle for a particular piece of software. When you need to use the dongle-based software, instead of reaching for the physical dongle you "activate" a dongle using the dongle server software. It essentially maps the USB port in the dongle server to a virtual USB port on your PC, so to the operating system or software, it's completely transparent and as if you've plugged the physical dongle in.

I reckon in my workplace, we would have close to 40 or 50 dongles of various types which are in constant use.

[Halcyon]

In my industry, we actually have dedicated "dongle servers" which are rack mount appliances with many USB ports.

You sure you're not getting troubles with EULA ?

Not at all. Only one dongle can be used by a single user at any one time. It doesn't allow one dongle to be shared simultaneously by many. In fact, this kind of dongle "sharing" is encouraged by most software manufacturers. It's less time spent replacing or reprogramming lost or broken dongles.

It's no different to having a physical dongle somewhere where any employee can go and grab it and use it. The licensing for these kinds of applications are generally granted to the organisation, not a particular user within the organisation.

[Fungus]

Software dongles are very much still around!

All those cheapo laser cutters on Aliexpress come with a USB dongle.

[Fungus]

I think I still have my developer's kit for it.

I just searched my hard disk for the word "sentinal" and found my copy inside a folder of old junk. 

I attach the reference guide.

[TheSteve]

The PC software for my reflow oven requires a USB dongle.

[HwAoRrDk]

I remember having to use those little purple USB Sentinel dongles back in the mid '00s. It was for a piece of software used to control large, fast (and very expensive) lab-grade photographic negative scanners.

As an end-user it didn't make sense that it used a dongle, as a copy of the software was bundled with each scanner machine, and as far as I know could not be purchased separately. Perhaps it was because the software was made by a third-party company, and they primarily wanted to keep the machine manufacturer honest.

The software was crap anyway. It had all the signs of being done fairy amateurishly in Visual Basic by someone who wasn't a professional programmer. Also caused me many headaches by not being able to run in Windows under a non-admin account, which meant the computers could not be locked-down against undue fiddling by the machine operators.

[KaneTW]

I make a point of removing the dongle check for any software that uses a dongle. It's a ridiculous practice when you can just remove the software check in most software in an afternoon.

[Chipguy]

The developer's kit, along with one of my original Altera dongles and a few others.  Of course, you some old vintage software to go with it. 

Care to guess what the custom made programmable dongle was for?

Thanks for sharing!
Foundation packs and pistons in the shelf. That's an unusual combination.
I  have bad memories about the Foundation software pack. This stuff was bad.
It didn't calculate the resistance of the internal paths correctly, so when I had like 5 cells driven by another cell across the entire chip I had to set and locate a buffer manually.
Otherwise the data would not make it. Back then I used the XC5200.
It was the first software that did  not cost an arm an a leg. For the real stuff like Synopsys or Synplicity they demanded your soul.

[james_s]

I loathe dongles.

I remember one job I worked we had some professional graphics software the artists used. The dongles caused so much trouble most people just used a crack and left the stupid dongle in the box on the shelf.

I wish I could find a crack for the Bernina embroidery software. My grandmother had the whole package, about $4k worth of software, after she passed away my other half got the machine but the dongle got lost somewhere in the handling of the estate so we have a fancy machine that is only useful as a sewing machine. I'm sure as hell not going to drop $2k on a new copy of something we already own just to have another stupid dongle that could get lost.

[Bicurico]

This dongle shown in the video is a parallel port RAINBOW SENTINEL dongle of the older kind.
Newer ones are shorter.
They then became replaced by USB versions, of which there are several iterations, too. It started with blue ones, then purple ones, yellow ones. Then they became black with a new design and presently they are purple again with yet another design change.

Rainbow now belongs to "gemalto". They purchased the competing system, HASP, too.

The picture shown here shows some versions (I am not affiliated to this site - just used a quick Google search): https://wissenuk.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb/articles/200892443-Safenet-Super-Pro-Dongle-Driver

These dongles essentially have two keys stored: the manufacturer key (= the individual key of the software provider using the dongle) and the serial number of the key (= the individual key number).

The protected software would periodically check if the correct dongle is attached to the computer.

Newer version of these dongles do more than that, but due to lack of precise knowledge I won't risk talking about this, in order to avoid false statements.

These dongle are still very popular in expensive software licensing, especially in CAD/CAM/CAE applications (I work in this field).

A software license for a single seat my cost 10.000 Euro up to 50.000 Euro (in our case) or even more. It is only logic that manufacturer of said software want to protect the software against:

- Abusive use: customer buys one license but uses many licenses
- Illegal copies: companies use the software without purchasing any license
- Getting around maintenance contract: company buys one license without maintenance contract but keeps installing the latest version
- ...

This should not divert into a copyright discussion: it is what it is! International laws grant copyright and there are business models around this concept. Doesn't matter if you like it or not. If you don't like dongles and software protection, maintenance and license fees, then just don't use that particular software!

In case of CAD/CAM/CAE it is incredible how complex the software is. It takes thousands of man-years to develop software like NX, Catia, SolidWorks, Inventor, etc.

Dongle will ultimately disappear as software licensing is shifting to subscription models, which are cloud based. The usage is monitored by the provider and there is/will be no need for cracks anymore, because these won't give you full access to functionality or the software won't even work. Example: Fusion360. Try to "crack" than one...

Cracking CAD/CAM/CAE software is an interesting field, too.

Most applications offer single user and multi user licenses. The latter is known as network licensing and the biggest name in the market is FlexLM. Most cracks are based in cracking the specific vendor daemon of FlexLM rather than cracking the software itself. The vendor daemon is the service that is compiled for a given manufacturer and which checks the license file against the dongle and/or MAC address. The crack consisted in tweaking this check. You would then install the unchanged software and have it connect to the cracked license server. This would cover about 80% of all CAD/CAM/CAE cracks.

Apart from the easier crack elaboration, it would be quite universal! If you knew how to tweak one vendor daemon, you could probably crack other vendors, too. Without even knowing how to use the software itself.

Then there were the normal cracks of the software, which would work only for one specific version. Here the dongle check was simply patched.

Finally you had the dongle emulators.

These worked roughly like this: a free tool would read out the dongle data. This sounds simple but really involved doing a brute force attack on the dongle to guess the provider and dongle ID. What is often forgotten is that new dongles would often break or malfunction after such a procedure.

If you read out the data successfully prior of breaking the dongle (much like the SIM extraction tools for SIM cards), you could send it to one of the crackers (or semi-legal companies - very popular in Germany, they used to place adds "Dongle-Ärger") and get the dongle emulator. I guess these dongle emulators ended up leaking for the general public.

Of course this was a cat & mouse game: every new software version would patch the hole that lead to a crack (including on the FlexLM server).

But the most amazing crack I have come across was one, where the CAD/CAM software would read out the dongle ID. If no dongle was connected, the dongle ID would be "Invalid ID". The license file was encrypted for the dongle ID. So some crackers made a license generator tailored for the dongle ID "Invalid ID"! This license file would just work without any crack at all. It is said that the crack was done by someone involved in the company, as it contained too much inside knowledge.

Finally, the dongles had their prime time in an area where the internet was not commonly available and licenses were sent out by FAX. These had signatures that would match the dongle ID.

So all in all, I don't see any reason to laugh about dongles and their use.

Regards,
Vitor

[KaneTW]

One of the software I'm forced to use is KNX's ETS software to program the KNX devices in my house. For a single non-trivial project, a seat costs 1k EUR --- not much, in the grand scheme of things, but also kind of absurd for a single home (~100) worth of devices.

It has one of these piddly dongles that break USB ports if someone bumps against them:

, even for the cheap-o lite version (200? EUR)

Feels like a waste of effort. I understand doing it for 5 digit+ software, but this is silly.