Armadillo?

#1 (**permalink**) July 8th, 2002

Quote:

2) It's protected by Armadillo, so it's nearly impossible to reverse engineer.
3) All information is sent to the screen in pixelated form, not text. With some other clients, it's possible to run a program in the background that reads the text on the screen. Not possible with Bearshare. At least, not unless they read the bitmaps and converted them into text, which would not only take a load of system resources to do, but it wouldn't be quite as exact, either.

what is armadillo, what is it doing?
alll information is pixelated? Bearshare is not using MFC/WinAPI anymore, hu?

please explain more detailed. thanks.

#2 (**permalink**) July 8th, 2002

sanelson?

sanelson · #3 (**permalink**) July 9th, 2002

Armadillo is a security feature which runs in the background which won't let Bearshare run if a debugger is being run at the same time.

As for the other part, I'll just quote Vinnie.

Quote:

Originally posted by Vinnie

Note that the BearShare lists (hosts, uploads, downloads, etc...) are standard Windows list controls with the "owner draw behavior".

In laymans terms, this means that the information you see displayed is actually drawn as pixels and not stored in the windows control.

Therefore, it is impossible to write another program which scans the windows list control and extracts the text. For example, there are programs which run while AOL is running, and harvest the screen names of people in chat rooms (to send them spam).

This type of harvesting is not possible with BearShare, due to the owner drawn list control.

One way around this would be to capture the pixels themselves and perform character-matching at the bitmap level, though.

cultiv8r · #4 (**permalink**) July 9th, 2002

When "pixelated" text is shown on the screen, it means other programs running in the background can't just monitor the API or the screen for text output.

Simple example, just highlight this piece of text and you'll be able to cut and paste it in Notepad.

Now try to do the same with the following:

#5 (**permalink**) July 9th, 2002

Sanelson, thanks for the second part!

It would be fun to show Vinnie is telling nonsense and owner draw controls do not provide real security, GetText() is just the most simple way not the only.

about Armadillo, hmm, do you have more information? Vinnie must be really afraid of being hacked, funny.

#6 (**permalink**) July 9th, 2002

found info about Armadillo.

also some tools called 'Armadillo protection remover' and 'Armadillo deprotector 1.1'. I don't link them here to do the mods a favour (debugger and such tools are legal though). I guess Dr.Damn wouldn't be delayed more then 5 minutes by Vinnies's security ideas. a "proof of concept" would be nice.

PS: Morg, this info is free for you

Morgwen · #7 (**permalink**) July 9th, 2002

Quote:

Originally posted by Unregistered
found info about Armadillo.

also some tools called 'Armadillo protection remover' and 'Armadillo deprotector 1.1'. I don't link them here to do the mods a favour (debugger and such tools are legal though). I guess Dr.Damn wouldn't be delayed more then 5 minutes by Vinnies's security ideas. a "proof of concept" would be nice.

PS: Morg, this info is free for you

nice security.

Morgwen

#8 (**permalink**) July 9th, 2002

Quote:

Originally posted by Morgwen
I thought its no good idea to share the key?

Morgwen

hi Morgwen, oh did someone extract Vinnie's key already?

Morgwen · #9 (**permalink**) July 9th, 2002

Quote:

Originally posted by Unregistered

hi Morgwen, oh did someone extract Vinnie's key already?

I edited my post. because I am not sure if you can do it with this armadillo protection remover... so ignore this statement!

Morgwen

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