How are CD Keys generated?

Posted by The Rook on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by The Rook
Published on 2010-06-08T23:24:04Z Indexed on 2010/06/08 23:32 UTC
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security

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cryptography

CD Keys are the defacto-standard as an anti-piracy measure. To be honest this strikes me as Security Though Obscurity, although I really have no idea how CD Keys are generated. What is a good (secure) example of CD Key generation? What cryptographic primitive (if any) are they using? Is it a message digest? If so what data would they be hashing? What methods do developers employ to make it difficult for crackers to build their own key generators?

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