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Cracking Davinci Resolve Studio

Sun Dec 22 2024 • 2 min read

I’ve been using Davinci Resolve for a while now and I really like it. I checked out the Studio version but, as a broke student, I couldn’t afford it, but I still wanted the Studio version. So why not just crack it?

Setup

Most paid software requires a login to download, but you can download DaVinci Resolve Studio directly from their support webpage. So that’s exactly what I did.

Aight, let’s see what we’re dealing with.

A screenshot of DaVinci Resolve Studio asking for a license key

It’s a simple license check. If you enter an invalid license key like MEOWW-MEOWW-MEOWW-MEOWW-MEOWW, you get an error: “License key is invalid”.

Reverse Engineering

I had an idea of what to look for, so I opened up the poor man’s IDA, Ghidra. After loading the Resolve.exe binary into Ghidra and waiting for what felt like forever, I finally got start.

I searched for the error message “License key is invalid” and found this piece of code handling errors.

A screenshot of Ghidra showing the error message 'License key is invalid'

This didn’t look too helpful, but digging through the XREFS led me to something better.

A screenshot of Ghidra showing the error message 'Activated successfully'

Looking at the code, I noticed that if param_2 equals 0 on line 35, it shows “Activated successfully”. This is definitely what I was looking for. I patched the binary, changing that JZ into JNZ, and tried entering an invalid license key again.

A screenshot of DaVinci Resolve Studio showing the license key

It worked! However, this method isn’t very practical since the program asks for a license key every time it’s opened up. But honestly, I couldn’t be bothered to fix that.