Anticrack - Secure your Applications

Ever since I released LuckyWheel I was afraid of piracy. It has become an easy sport to crack iPhone apps. You only need a certain freely available tool to run on a jailbroken iPhone and your hard work will be posted onto one of serveral sites dedicated solely to releasing cracked apps. The price level you can ask for is extremely low as it stands. Coupled with unpaid illegal copies this might mean the death of many a small one-person-developement company. Something needed to happen!

I researched quite a bit and took the plunge. I implemented several distinct checks and found out which work and which don’t. I downloaded a couple of cracked IPAs myself to inspect them and fine tune my code. After extensive refinement I was able to submit several apps and updates to Apple and they where approved without a hitch.

So the technology was sound. But is was impracticable. Because the checks for the most part have to rely on data that is only available after the project build phase. You would have to go in and manually tweak those bits for every SDK version and every build setting. When more and more people asked me to give it to them I had no choice but to package it in a way that would work automatically.

So I am proud to present: AntiCrack

These are the necessary steps to implement AntiCrack in your project.

• Put my command line tool into your project directory to collect post-build anti-cracking information
• A header to #import with an inline function doing all checks for you
• Instructions how to add the necessary post-build script step
• Then you hit “Build” twice, once to “arm” AntiCrack, the second time to activate it.

AntiCrack has these advantages:

• proven technology, it’s present and working in released apps
• compatible with all present and future iPhone SDKs and OSs
• No need to manually change any settings when changing between debug, release and distribution
• no sneaky stuff that Apple might not like, only official APIs are used
• … in fact: you get to see ALL source code
• several happy customers, some of which paid as much as $50 to get their hands on this
• the other copy detection service charges $100 setup and asks for up to 5% of your royalties. AntiCrack is completely free to use, and does not need to contact a server to work.

The full source of this article is located here