No More Pirated Games in Two Years, Cracking Group Warns | Hacker News Reader

No More Pirated Games in Two Years, Cracking Group Warns

torrentfreak.com

It would have been nice to read a bit more about the technical challenges involved. I don't care pirated games disappearing (I dislike DRM, but I prefer to buy my DRM-free games legally), but the technical challenges could be interesting.

Same here- not too upset about pirated games disappearing, but I also live in the US where it's easy to buy games online for a reasonable price. From what I understand, in other countries marketplaces aren't as available and/or pricing isn't far (i.e. Australia)

I find this really interesting, but I don't have the knowledge around the tech to fully judge whether the statement is hyperbole or not.

Is anyone able to ELI5 how one goes about cracking a game like this?

I haven't touched this particular game, but from experience cracking just takes a lot of time but is never impossible, unless the program is using something you have no control over like a DRM chip or something like that. Even then, everything has holes.

You can use the strongest encryption but at some point you need to have the game decrypted in memory. You can have a tonne of obfuscation but not enough that would hinder the game's performance. As long as you have control over the machine that runs it, you can crack it. It's just a matter of time and making the cracker so bored that they just give up. Which is what is happening here.

But they will succeed, or someone else will.

I'm curious if they implement some sort of rootkit or a bootkit. Those are pretty hard to deal with, relatively. But uhm... history repeats itself. [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...

I'm far from an expert, but what I've heard about Denuvo's latest generation of DRM tech is pretty clever. The details that have surfaced from their PR and independent analysts is that they're verifying the integrity of the executable and loaded libraries in memory occasionally at runtime. This short-circuits a lot of simple memory-clobbering or library-substitution tricks that crackers use to route around additional vendor-specific DRM solutions added by Steam or Origin.

Coming from the anti-DRM position, I'm pretty impressed because they found a way to verify that the original game is running as intended without impacting the player experience in any observable way. Not my favorite thing from a "you can't modify this thing you bought" perspective, but in terms of making good on the ideal game DRM, it's pretty cool.

Full circle: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130307/17202922246/just-...

Moving to cloud-based systems with account monitoring would seem to stop piracy in it's tracks, no?

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