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.

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.

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

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.

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.