Download a shareware version of some commercial software. Design a plan for converting the shareware version to a full version without paying one cent. If it is not possible for the shareware to be converted to a full version, analyze what kind of techniques the software vendor has used to protect it. In addition, use some of the techniques mentioned in the attached document to do some black-box testing on the software and report your results in the report.
Black-box testing techniques
1- Exploring inputs
2- Exploring outputs
3- Exploring data
4- Exploring computation
5- Exploring the environments
The above, are techniques for testing the software by breaking its capabilities. The following, are techniques to break software by modifying its environments. The environment of a software package consists of four users: the human user, file user, kernel user, and other software user. James Whittaker proposed the following techniques (attacks) to test the software's robustness against bad environments:
1. Fill the file system to its capacity (file user)
2. Force the media to be busy or unavailable (file user)
3. Damage the media (file user)
4. Assign an invalid file name (file user): e.g., too long name, invalid character set/format.
5. Vary file access permissions (file user)
6. Vary/corrupt file contents (file user)
7. Inject realistic faults to kernel or other software calls (kernel user/other software user)
8. Monitor other software or kernel calls (kernel user/other software user)
9. Simulate by replaying the interesting scenarios (kernel user/other software user)
These black-box testing techniques for exploring the software environments could be carried out by simulating these environments. However, in order to generate software defects that are repeatable by others, it is preferable to use some testing tool such as Holodeck (commercial version or trial version) or Canned Heat. Canned Heat (an earlier freeware version of Holodeck) can be downloaded from https://www.se.fit.edu/CannedHEAT/Downloads.htm and Holodeck (one month trial version) can be downloaded from https://www.sisecure.com/.