Other how to clone a hardlock usb key

Hello everybody,

I've a usb hardlock (so it seems).

Connecting it into a usb port I receive the message:

#ugen0.6: <AKS Hardlock USB 1.12> at usbus0

Please, can you tell me if is there a solution ?

Thanks very much.
 
I'd imagine the whole point is that you cannot (easily) clone it and doing so may be illegal depending on your jurisdiction.
 
I'd imagine the whole point is that you cannot (easily) clone it and doing so may be illegal depending on your jurisdiction.
I'd immagine chat the USB hardlock is the mine, that i'm doing a performance test and to better understand the cloning of hard-locked devices it's necesary study it. And for personal use this is not forbidden. Surely ... To do something of illegal i'd avoid ti write on the Freebsd forum. So I do again the question. Is there a (legale or illegale) way ti cloning a USB hardlocked key ?
Thanks very much.
 
Can you please explain what that "AKS Hardlock" device really is? And what you mean by "clone"?

It could be a storage device, with built-in authentication and encryption. It could also be a pure authentication device, without storage. I actually suspect that it is not a storage device, since most authentication devices don't interact like USB storage (those pretend disk drives), but have only a tiny amount of storage (kilobytes) which are used as part of the security protocols.

And when you say "clone", you certainly don't mean that you want to create a physical second copy, which would require re-creating all the hardware. I think what you mean is: you want to copy all the information that is stored in the device out of it. The issue I see with that is that the term "hardlock" typically applies to authenticated and encrypted devices, which are intentionally designed to not release any information unless you first authenticate. So the starting point has to be: find out how to "unlock" or authenticate to the device's satisfaction.

Here is a starting point: Find out what class of device this is. Every USB device has at least one "class", which tells you what kind of thing it is: a keyboard, a mouse, a printer, a scanner, a storage device, or something else. Typical examples include HID = human interface device for keyboard or mouse, and obviously storage. By using various debugging commands like usbconfig and the output from dmesg, you can find out what class of device this is. My hunch is: it is a type of device that FreeBSD doesn't support, because it comes up solely as a "ugen", meaning generic device. Once you know what class of device it is, you can determine what USB protocol you need to speak to it.

About the legal situation: In the US, it is plain illegal to subvert data protection mechanisms, such as hardware authentication or encryption, unless authorized, and with narrow exceptions for law enforcement and the legal system. Clearly, I am not authorized to do so for this particular device, so given the current level of knowledge about this thing, I really can't help you; all I can do is tell you what you have to do yourself. Since you are not in the US, you need to first study your own legal situation.
 
Maybe this device is the e-Token instead, used for secure user authentication. I dunno. Very scant details offered.
This isn't a hacking forum so this topic is inappropriate.
 
To see what it is doing you would need to have software that checks for the dongle. Like SolidCAM or ProE.
Set up a USB/COM software sniffer looking at what the software looks for from the dongle. >Probably all this is on Windows.<
Then you would have to spoof that. Probably a ROM chip on dongle and software checks for ROM and matches serial number.
Probably encrypted or bit shifted.
So there. I gave you a starting point. If this is an old device than maybe it uses broken crypto.

Somehow I get the feeling we are doing your homework for you.
Your professor gives you a challenging task and you are not good at searching.
 
Ah, thank you for looking it up. If AKS is really Aladdin, then attempting to crack this device is (a) fully illegal where I live, and (b) likely impossible without cooperation from the manufacturer. Furthermore, the device likely contains no significant information in and of itself, but is used as part of a digital rights management (DRM or copy protection or access control) system.
 
Exactly the dongle is just part of the license management scheme.
All this tied online now to the software company.
In the past even companies cheated on licensing. Buying only one seat but using more. Cracks on corporate computers.
Now a days it is pretty tough to defeat licensing regimes. Every software needing to be online and tattling on you.
 
This isn't a hacking forum so this topic is inappropriate.
If AKS is really Aladdin, then attempting to crack this device is (a) fully illegal

It is Aladdin.
But It's not clear the problem.

I've buyed the full Alladin encription system (software and USB sticks). However I'm not expert on encription theory or locking systems.
My question is devoted to see if it is easy "dd-ing", "cloning", "duplicate" (or what you want) these USB devices using the usual Unix tools (like dd).

If it's so hard as you say .... I'm very happy ... this means that is a good way to protect my software with an hardware locker stick.
That is: thes hardware locked sticks are more performant that the software licenses.

Is it right ?

Thanks very much.

PS. however I appreciate if you can tell me what's inside these USB locked sticks. Surely memory .... with or without filesystem ? Only a magic chip ? ...... Thanks in advance.

Bye bye.
 
Dongles used as physical "locks" for software usually contains a HSM of some kind (or whatever approximation of a HSM the vendor of such a dongle system thinks is safe enough). In other words: one or more microcontrollers, at least one with secure crypto / TPM functionality and some storage.
 
I've buyed the full Alladin encription system (software and USB sticks).
In that case, you are their customer, and should contact their customer support with this question. In practice, do NOT do that.

Actually, please read the license agreement you entered into when you bought and started using the device. See whether it allows you to duplicate the device. My educated guess: it absolutely totally prohibits it. The attempt of doing so probably immediately invalidates the license agreement, and you have a brick in your hand. Matter-of-fact, if Aladdin find this thread and identifies you, my educated guess is that your device will stop working, and you will get a letter from their lawyers. The kind of letter you will have to take to your lawyer, because dealing with it yourself might be too damaging.

My question is devoted to see if it is easy "dd-ing", "cloning", "duplicate" (or what you want) these USB devices using the usual Unix tools (like dd).
Typical authentication devices are small CPUs with permanent (non-modifiable) storage, a little bit of writable storage, and an interface, in this case USB. They always have unique "serial numbers" (I'm using that term here, the reality is more complicated). When you bought it, it was registered: Mr. Vince 66 owns Aladdin stick serial number 12345, which is authorized to unlock the software FooBar. Typically, they have additional "factors" for authentication, for example a fingerprint reader, or enough storage that they can work with local password authentication. All the information that is used in the authentication process is typically tied to each other. So for example, if this device stores your fingerprint or (encrypted) password, it does so relative to its own serial number. So even if you type the same password into a different device, it will know that the password doesn't match serial number 98765.

The way such a device typically works is that it executes a rather complex protocol with some software (typically shipped with the device, sometimes open source, there are some standards). For example, the computer asks the device: "Hi, I have a user here who says that he is Vince 66, and he wants to start the software FooBar." Response: "Please ask the user to enter his password, and then give me the SHA-512 hash of the password, salted with the one-time value 97531". "He entered a password, and the salted hash is 0xDEADBEEF". "Please put up a window asking the user to touch the fingerprint reader". "Done". "Thank you, hashed password and fingerprint both match, you can now start the FooBar software". Obviously there are more complex protocols, like "are you there and what software do you authenticate for", or "please store these few bytes securely for me", or "the old password hash was 0xDEADBEEF, please change the password to PaSsWoRd".

Typically, encryption and authentication hardware is built such that it is virtually impossible to read out all of the information, much less duplicate it. For example, there is probably no protocol that allows you to get the serial number of the device. Matter-of-fact, I used to work in the semiconductor equipment industry in the area of chip inspection, and security devices are typically built such that even by physically disassembling the chip (etching off layer by layer), you can not get at the stored information. For example, it might be stored in EPROM, in such a fashion that if you etch the layer above the capacitor cells off, all the information drains, and the serial number reads as 00000. It it can be laser-etched during manufacturing into a very soft material (like a metallization layer), which is then planarized and capped with a hard material (like SiO), and there is no way to etch without damaging the soft material.

Matter-of-fact, the whole purpose of such a device is that it can not be duplicated or completely read out. If it would be easy, with a few commands, to create duplicates of these devices, then their main function (copy protecting expensive software, or authenticating users for secure computing) would become completely pointless, since then someone could just duplicate hundreds of them, and sell the software behind the back of the real software company.
 
Slightly off-topic. Back in the late 80s a friend of mine used to distribute his software on "hardware-protected" floppies. Before writing the software, he was making a tiny hole in the floppy's material with a laser, then reformatting the disk. Each copy of the software was checking for that particular bad block, which was almost impossible to replicate.
 
Vince,
I tried to clone a dongle for employees. The task was to complete the project in a short period, I had to use a third-party program. And https://www.donglify.net/ helped. in two months we didn’t spend a lot of money, but we did the work and sent it to customers on time.
I did not find a free option for cloning and sharing a dongle.
Perhaps it will help you.
Good luck.
 
Hello, and Happy new year🥳🎉
I don't know if here must ask, but the issue discussed seems to help me.:) (I hope).
Now: I have a software who work with usb dongle. If I insert USB dongle in my PC, in device manager appear something like that: "human interface..", so my PC "sees" usb dongle, and this dongle is good.
But, when start application, I receive "no dongle found".
Does anyone have any ideas?
Thank you
 
Now: I have a software who work with usb dongle. If I insert USB dongle in my PC, in device manager appear something like that: "human interface..", so my PC "sees" usb dongle, and this dongle is good.
This is about Windows right? You do realize you're not on a generic PC help forum here? This is a forum for the FreeBSD OS, we do not support any other OS.

Rule #7: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-forums-rules.38922/

 
Hello,

I'm sorry I was wrong. It was just a question about that USB dongle, unrelated to the operating system. I saw that here the members understand what this device does (I read all the discussions before) and I thought that someone has an idea, where to look. I guess it does the same regardless of the operating system. The computer sees it, the software that accesses it does not. Finally, if it is not the right place, please delete the post, I do not want to create inconvenience for you.

Thanks
 
No inconvenience. We sometimes get people dropping in asking Windows questions because they've seen something they think is related to their issue too. We cannot and will not support Windows questions here.
 
But, when start application, I receive "no dongle found".
I assume by dongle, some sort of copy protection USB stick, e.g. Steinberg Key for Cubase.
Generally to let host program communicate whith such HID devices, you have to install an additional device driver, which is supplied with purchased product.
Not very common today, but some EDA and DAW need such drivers to communicated with some external devices e.g. DSP-assisted external sound card, or software protection dongles.
 
Also slightly off topic. At some point before EU was founded there was a legal loophole, hacking encrypted satellite channels wasn't strictly illegal if the service in question wasn't available in your country. We did our share learning those encryption methods. However, my point is there are chips which are write-only. They cannot be read. Meaning you can take such a chip and put it in a programmer and flash it, but you can't read it back. And you are not supposed to!
 
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encrypted satellite channels [...] chips which are write-only [...]
Interesting topic. I thinks it's better to open an Off-topic thread on this subject. Hardware/encryption is interesting subject. For sure, more fun than "WHY FBSD ETC".
 
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