Keygen

How are keygens made?

Ok, applications which ask for a serial number knows which right ones are or which are wrong ones. That means there is some mechanism (a chunk of code) which compares the serial we enter with ‘something’. Here, what is important is that something, which is a valid key/serial.

There are applications like SoftICE (a debugger) which can be used to ‘open’ the application, (or the exe file) and see the code in assembly language. And it allows to keep a break point when this comparison is done. That is, when you enter the serial and when the application compares this with something, the control goes back to the SoftICE and one can see the code.

So, is it that easy? Nope. Many a times some number or alpha numeral is generated using some tough logic. So, it all depends on how well one can understand this part. Then the programmer uses his/her favorite programming language (mostly C (family), VB or Delphi) to code a keygen . Usually they make use of windows API/dll and link them dynamically to make the size of the keygen tiny.