Protecting UACD ! -Some Insight

[rikgale]

I can fully see where your coming from, and your urge to get 100% cover, but defeating that 30% out of the 99% is a must, and I fully argree on that. The 1% will be people who are way cleverer than us and have seen something that we have missed. I don't wish to take any steam from this effort, which btw is fanstatic. I have spent way too much of my time (at work) thinking about how to make a second security layer, or even a single that is more secure than the current way. So far I have to say that I have come up with very little.

My one and only idea, based on the encrypting the enitre $OEM$ folder structure would be to password this and during the install or windows pop up a box for a password. However this then breaks the idea of a completely UACD, as it is no longer UA. As with everything there are pro's and cons.

[rikgale]

NOTE - Do not remove 16Bit Application Support in Nlite if you wish to use the pkunzip.exe assoisated with ProtectUA. pkunzip is a 16bit application

[rikgale]

Can anyone suggest a 32bit standalone unzipper that can be called from the cmd line?? Please help and I'll tweak the code alittle to get it working. Any help??

[digitalfrost]

Try 7za.exe from the 7-Zip Archiver. www.7-zip.org

[rikgale]

Cheers digitalfrost, I did not think of that, and I'll get better compression as well. Will have a try later.

[rikgale]

Ok. I got it working. Now you can replace pkunzip with 7za. It took a lot of work, although you can really tell from the code changes, but my g/f will testify to the work put in (and the large amount of cursing that went with it everytime an installation test failed). The post with a link to the new files is here.

The code that I changed was

Else If strYouAreWelcome = 1 Then
 ObjShell.Run ("C:\PKUNZIP -e -d -s" & strPassword & " C:\Protect.zip C:\"), 0, True
End If
End If

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
objFSO.DeleteFile ("C:\Protect.zip")
objFSO.DeleteFile ("C:\PKUNZIP.EXE")

to

Else If strYouAreWelcome = 1 Then
 ObjShell.Run ("C:\7za.exe e C:\Protect.zip -p" &strPassword& " -oC:\ -y"), 0, True
End If
End If

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
objFSO.DeleteFile ("C:\Protect.zip")
objFSO.DeleteFile ("C:\7za.exe")

Simple really, unless you don't know any vbs programming and forget to hardcode the location of 7za.exe and protect.zip, and sorting out the spaces with the password. Anyways it works now and have just tested it in an Nlited XP wit 16bit support removed

[filu]

Just curious but somehow not really out to read over 20 pages of thread: what's the gist out of this discussion here? somebody can tell me? thx! a summary could be interesting for others as well, no?!

[MOONLIGHT SONATA]

Just curious but somehow not really out to read over 20 pages of thread: what's the gist out of this discussion here? somebody can tell me? thx! a summary could be interesting for others as well, no?!

Well, Filu, Welcome to MSFN . Here you'll learn a whole new dimension of computing. Everyday. Thanks for your interest in Protection. Rikgale made an excellent guide out of the extract of discussions going on here. You'll be rightfully helped by reading his Guide Page: How to protect your UACD - Ulitimate Guide. Hope, you read it and keep your interest alive.

[zpashaz]

Don't know if that's exactly what are you looking for but BCDW 2.01a has password option, basically you can configure it to ask for a passworg when cd boots. It won't protect the data on cd, but prevent booting cd by curious people who borrow other people's cds without permission.