Once upon a time when I was at secondary school, the computers in the library were protected with a program called Applock. Very Windows ‘95 it was too.

The utility was written by Anaplastic Software in 1994 and was available as Shareware with an option to buy for $12.50, which my school had done. The company seems to be long since gone, but you can still download the application from some places on the Internet.

The challenge

As I was a very annoying teenager with a lot of spare time on my hands, I decided to reverse engineer the product a little; not only to find an “override” password but also to deduce how easy it was to register the software without paying for it..

Albeit very rudimentary, I ran a website with all the appropriate details once upon a time - and I’ve decided to bring some of the content back to life.

The good

It appears there were only ever 3 registration combinations for the application, which you could use any combination of name/company details with. You have to run the “alsetup.exe” utility to register the application. I’ve included all the codes these below.

Your Name: Whatever you fancy
Your Company: Whatever you fancy

Then, choose one of the below registration combinations.

Registration Code: LEPIX#5K0%31
Control Number: 67489253

Registration Code: QEJOC!7DI&33
Control Number: 03567192

Registration Code: NAGOV?7RI$76
Control Number: 49203871

Registration is all rather academic though as if you put the following text in %windir%\aspms.dll it thought it was registered…

[Registration]
MSG3=THANK GOD IT'S FREEZING !

The bad

If you wanted to bypass the pre-set Applock password, you could use the password m4a1r9r1i9a9g1e.

For reasons entirely unknown, this password seems to include the word marriage. A hex editor on the executable file was all that was needed to find that gem.

The ugly

The actual registration data gets stored in %windir%\applock.ini.

The real configured password gets stored in a cleartext variable “ALEditBox” but reversed (super secure) in %windir%\aspms.dll.