Meaning that with one or even just a few valid keys on hand they would look mostly random and be mostly unbreakable by brute force. With some things such as CD keys especially back in the day with early 'primitive' encryption methods that did not have the decades widespread of knowledge about salts and hashes, most people just used a method of security through obscurity. Either b.net says its valid and tells your local client that on install (and any subsequent login to battle net multiplayer), or it doesn't and you cannot install or play online.

The trick is that you can only get it online from their servers, so there is no need to have local software to decode anything. They simply keep a record on their end that it is a valid key in good standing. The newer system is essentially a serial # that is issued to you. Sometimes they'd get, sometimes they'd just sort of get it, so that it sometimes produces a valid key.Įventually Blizzard switched to an online only version of the keys that works totally differently.

Key gens would be when someone thinks they've figured out the cd key to decoded value formula, and have a way to run it backwards. This means that there re likely far more valid keys than actual retail packages that were ever sold. The last thing you wanted was to suddenly have your valid keys start getting rejected. Maybe you get lucky and have a massive run away success and sell 10x more copies than you projected. They might never download new patches (with updates to the key 'decoding' formula). They'd build a LOT of leeway into it though because it could not be assumed that the customer would go online with it ever. The installer is set so that anything from like 250,000,000 to 350,000,000 would show up as a valid key.

(Note this is a massive oversimplification.)īasically, you take the key printed on the disc, the software in the installer package runs it through some mathematical formula and that spits out a number between 1 and say 5,000,000,000. I was never into cracking on Blizzard games, but some others that I was aware of essentially accepted any key that resolved into a narrow band of possible values. To be fair, it is more likely that you guessed a valid key that simply had never been sold. Last updated at 14:00:17 UTC Weekly Help Desk RAGE Loot Thread Trade Thread

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