Posted by Joseph on 1/24/2000, 10:50 pm
, in reply to "Re: interesting find"
209.179.250.106
Discovering that AC200-0 is a good key for Nam = "" and Company = "" is an interesting one and, as far as I could tell, it must be a legitimate key. Let me explain why I think so: You can register the program at any time with AC200-0 as key wile leaving Nam and Company blancs regardless who many time you have used it.
If you did not know how the key was constructed and how the second part was calculated, you would have hard time finding a key for the two empty places for the name and the company.
Of course the author of the program could have prevented you from using null strings for Name and Company by checking for a minimum string length for each of them, but he would for a 0 value as the result of the calculation, although easy, might create other problems which might exclude certain Name-Company combinations from being used.
Why? Because it is possible for the program to calculate as 0 the second part of the key. This is how:
As you know, and as everybody on this forum should know by now, the second part of the key is formed by multiplying the ACII value of each character of Name and Company by another number pulled from a table and summing all these multiplication and dividing the sum by 100000 and then taking the remainder as the number for the second part of the key. It is possible, but I have no idea how probable, to have a Name-Company combination of characters which might produce a sum of 100000 or a multiple of it which, in that case will give a 0 as the second part of the key.
I know that the odds are not in favor of this scenario, but I thought it might be a good exorcize for thinking minds.
+Sandman, I don't think it is an intentional back door. I will answer some of the questions you asked in another post in my thread.Best regards,
Joseph