Nice title, ah? :) Let's wait for search engines robots to index it. Why this title? 'Cos, according Ben, Windows Vista can be cracked by simple brute-force attack. Yes, I know, this ugly and dumb long, but it's possible. Let's take it up...
Windows Vista key, as well as near all Microsoft's product keys, is build according following pattern: xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx. Let's say, that I do not know what character should be and where, so I'm suppose, that we have deal with 25 alphanumeric characters. In English alphabet there is 26 case-insensitive characters and 10 numbers, so we have a deal with 3625 combinations, which about equals to 8 with 38 zeros. So, let's take really quick computer and do bruteforce over UI thread of Windows. In this case we can work with 10ms delay, so we can check 100 combinations a second. Now, in worse case, we'll find a key within 836 seconds, other words, about 90,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hours, equals to 313,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Pretty long isn't it? BUT there are some rules, discovered a couple of month ago, so, according them, we can minimize the number of possibilities to about 815. For some reason, I will not explain how, but in this case, even using UI validation and our brute-force attack, we can find the working key within about 66 years. BUT (another one) if we'll work without UI with a couple of hardcore computers, with a bit of luck and 6 million of China vendors, we'll find a golden key rather fast. So, should Microsoft be worry about this point? Maybe, within the next couple of years :)
Someone want to build such key generator?
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