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I am on an anti-piracy project. I am trying to re-identify devices based on their UDID. But I am wondering if jailbroken devices are hiding the real UDID and instead using a random generated one.

Is there an other way to identify a device? Perhaps some kind of cookie? Or an other Id/Hardwarehash?

Or can I get the UDID on a reliable way?

Thx for all answers!

Gering
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Don't waste your time.

Focus on making the app convince your users to spend money on it and don't worry about piracy. There are lots and many apis, tricks and methods to foil piracy and all of them are overcome in a short time.

The idea of a cracker is to show they are smarter than you. So only way to "fight" them is to take their audience away. And that you do by making a great product that users are willing to pay for.

Olaf
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  • But I am building a service to detect cracks and a core feature is to find devices with more than one cracked app on it. – Gering Feb 04 '11 at 16:18
  • I have not seen any hiding their UDID, but I never looked for it. Let's go offtopic as I do not see a business case for such a service. point 1: not all jailbreaker use cracked sw. Point 2: not all who use cracked sw would have payed for sw anyway. This leave a small percentage of users where some money can be extracted. The music industry has demonstrated that fighting piracy doesn't work if the product is not seen as being valuable or if the product is difficult to use or to obtain. To me as a developer such a service would not add value. But that is only my personal opinion :) – Olaf Feb 05 '11 at 11:37
  • This service will add value for you, if you have an app that could produce cost to you by using any pay service. For instance a sms app. You will have to pay for the sms gateway and I am sure, you don't want cracked apps to use your gateway. – Gering Feb 10 '11 at 17:56
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Can't really be done. There is a jailbroken app called UDID faker (also a few others), which will generate a random UDID. Also, because jailbreakers have access to terminal, every feature of the hardware can be altered.

If a cracker knows what they are doing, which they ALL do, then your service will be blown wide open within a couple of days, if not hours.

If Apple can't detect and prevent this, with an army of extremely talented programmers, why do you think you will fare better?

If you could solve the piracy issue, you wouldn't be making an app, you'd be contracted by Microsoft.

Helpful Erik
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