Best place to hide a key in the Windows Registry?

Question

Hello All!

My Delphi program has a built-in protection mechanism to check for banned license keys on the Internet and displays a message to the user if a blacklisted key is found.

I'd like to store the blacklisted key in the registry, so if the user tries to re-enter it (and he/she is not connected to the Internet), it's not accepted.

What is the best way to hide an obfuscated entry in the Windows registry?

Thanks!

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Edit: You guys have some good answers there, but I feel like I need to expand the question.

This is not mainstream software but a corporate one. Clients pre-pay one year and get a one-year license key for activation. The license key includes a machine ID and can't be used elsewhere.

The problem is that some clients tend not to pay in time or they don't pay at all. Since I don't want to bother with shorter than one year license keys (too much administrative overhead) I need a way to disable their licenses till they pay.

So the app now will connect to the Internet upon launch and check if their key is blacklisted. If it is, I need to disable access. In case they reinstall or block Internet access, I need to know if the key has been blacklisted.

Thus, I'm thinking it would be best to hide it in the registry. My users are not tech-savy enough to use registry tools to monitor the registry, but if I put it under HKLM/Software/MyCompany/MyProgram, some of them might do find it. So I need a place where they can't find it afterwards that it had been created. (Noone will be expecting it!)

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you really want to go that way, hash or encrypt the keys and then check the hashed or encrypted user key to those on the registry.

Be sure to check if there's any keys in the registry to be sure if the user didn't erased them.

Answer 2

I don't think that the registry is a good place to hide such info, because anyone can download and use the Process Monitor (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx) tool and see what your program does with the registry.

And thinking about this again. You will probably make users of your software unhappy if it will leave things in registry and other "secret" places on the user's hard drive. Locations like that are also easily discovered by tools that monitor what system functions your software calls.

As an alternative you could embed the banned keys in your application when you release new versions. This way the banned keys will be hidden in the application making it much harder for crackers to bypass the protection.

The downside of this is that a user can potentially run older version with a banned key with internet access blocked to your site, but if your software is actively developed with new features and bugfixes added, then nobody would want to run older versions. And if you are very paranoid you could release "updates" which update just the embedded banned key list.

But in the end no software protection scheme is perfect. If your software is popular enough there will always be a pirate cracker who will figure out your protection and make a patch or even a key generator.

Answer 3

It will be very challenging to achieve what you're trying to do, since a user can simply uninstall and re-install, and savvy users can wipe all traces of your app from the system (including the registry).

Other apps (like Windows, for example), instead of checking for a negative (banned key), instead check for a positive (good key). You "activate" the software once (when connected online) and this activation stores the "good key", which you can then check for whenever running the software (whether online or offline).

I'd suggest the second approach for you.

Answer 4

The eaysiest way to hide a key or a value is to create a key/value having '\0' inside of the name. You can do this wth respect of the native functions NtCreateKey (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff556468.aspx) NtSetValueKey (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff557688.aspx) which use UNICODE_STRING as parameters instead of LPCTSTR. You can read more about usage of native registry API in http://www.codeproject.com/kb/system/NtRegistry.aspx for example. A Delphi code you will find here http://www.delphi3000.com/articles/article_3539.asp.

UPDATED: Because many people read this question I want to add some words to my answer. I want divide the part of the question which we can read also in the title "best place to hide a key in the Windows Registry" from the subject with license keys. Because I read some answers (written before me) which concerned almost only the part of license keys and read practically no answer on the question from the title I wrote me answer.

The subject with license key I find very complex. It depends on the licensing model choosed. It's important how to generate, to distribute (to install) and to verify the key. Is key should be hardware depended or not? It can be one per computer or one per computer group. The key generation, key installation or key verification can be either with respect of some online services (also from the internet) or without there. I can continue... There are a lot of aspects, advantages and disadvantages of different approaches.

So I decide to answer only on the main question from the title which is clear and have a separate interest. All other questions about license key should be discussed in my opinion in the separate question after clearing all requirements.

UPDATED 2 based on the updated question: It seems to me in your case would be better to use some scenario based on cryptographic signing of an activation ticket. For example the schema can looks like following:

• You software installed on the client computer will need an activation. Before activation it can not work or work in very restricted form (for example only some menus needed for software activation are enabled).
• You write a server component which will be used by client during the activation to generate the license key based of the activation request received from the client.
• If a client pay for the software you include the information about the client's "machine ID" (in any form which you want) in the database on the server.
• After starting of the activation process from the client software (either at the program start of from menu or in any other way like you want) it collects some information about the computer like computer name ("machine ID"), some serial numbers or some other information about hardware or operation system which can not be changed without a new activation. This information the software send to your server (it is the activation request).
• The server verify that the the client with the "machine ID" payed for the software and is not yet activated. Then the server calculate the hash (SHA1, MD5 or some other) from the information send from the client and sign the respond with the server's private key (or servers certificate). The signed ticket server will be send back to the client. This ticket will play the role of licence key.
• The server can add any additional information to the ticket before signing. For example it can add the information about the date till one the software should be valid (for example, current day plus one year). So the ticket which will be send back to the client can contain the hash of input activation information and any additional information, all what you want. Important is only that the information should be signed. In general you can include full client's request as clear text in the servers ticket instead of including of the hash, but the usage of the hash a) reduce the ticket size and b) makes the ticket a little more secure.
• Every client have public key corresponds to the private key used by server for signing of the activation ticket. The client save the ticket received from the server during activation in any place in registry of in the file system.
• Every next time if the client software will be started the software will read the saved activation ticket from the registry (or from the file system). Then the software collect the same information, which are used for generation of the activation ticket, calculate the hash and compare it with the hash from the saved ticket. It verify of cause the signature of the ticket with respect of the public key (or with respect of the server's certificate). Moreover the software can verify any other additional policy information from the ticket like the time till one the ticket is valid.

All written is a roughly schema only, but it is very simple and it is extensible. You need only study how use some simple cryptographic operation and implement there in your software.

As a option you can don't have a server online, but instead of that implement in the software (in menu for example) a possibility to generate the activation request and send it per email for example. Then you can offline (!!!) generate an activation ticket based of the server request and send the ticket back to the client also per email. A simple Reg-file which can be imported by double-click or some other simple import possibility in your software (cut & paste in the activation dialog) can end the process of the software activation.

Answer 5

Note that there are ordinary end-consumer tools that monitor what applications write to the registry (like Cleansweep). This goes on API call level, so it will probably catch #0 workarounds too.

You could try to encrypt the whole shebang in a registry key, with something that uniquely identifies the machine (like a mac address) and a timestamp, to avoid that people can move the key to other machines. THen always require the presence of such key to startup, and demand to connect to internet for updates/activation if it is not there. (or the timestamp is very old)