Hacker News Reader

Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone speculate what in the world is even tripping Denuvo up in this scenario? Is there a realistic threat model they add to their garbageware that tries to detect... multiple physical distinct CPUs on one system as an indicator that the game is pirated? What a weird check.

View on HN

From PCMag story:

"The errors occur because Denuvo’s DRM software will mistakenly think the so-called "Performance-cores" and "Efficiency-cores" (P-cores and E-cores) on the chip belong to two separate PCs, when in reality the two types of processing cores are running on the same Alder Lake processor. (This P-core/E-core design is a new trait of Intel's chips with Alder Lake.)

“Once it detects that some portion of the load has been split between the P- and E-cores, it sees the new cores as a new license holder (a separate system), and force-quits the game to prevent what it believes is two PCs trying to play one game on the same key,” wrote PCMag reviewer Chris Stobing."

LOL

Imagining an alternate timeline where they intentionally make you buy a separate license per-core

if Oracle made games

Windows on early multi-cpu machines did, I think they still do for multiple physical cpus.

Afaik, Windows "Home" is limited to 1, "Professional" to 2 and "Pro for Workstations" to 4 CPUs.

Can be nicely tested with virtualization (e.g. KVM). Just assign multiple CPUs with one core each and Windows will only use the amount of "CPUs" that the license allows. A single CPU with a bazillion cores is no problem, though.

I only know this because I ran into that exact pitfall several times already.

Yes wasn't this an issue when the early benchmarks of the threadrippers came out? I think there was some kind of thread limit.

Apparently there was, and probably still is (process groups): https://www.anandtech.com/show/15483/amd-threadripper-3990x-...

And here's a table about hardware restrictions for Windows 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_editions#Comparison...

Looks like Windows 10 Pro is limited to 128 cores / threads per CPU. Guess I was a bit off with my "bazillion" remark above, but who with access to that kind of hardware would ever want to waste it on Windows anyway?

Seems so arbitrary and petty. But thankfully I like another OS that doesn't do this! :)

The process group thing isn't pettiness, it's an implementation flaw.

that's exactly how is sold... Windows server had that model, and Windows for workstations too. it just bundled them in so you can't buy exactly 1:1

Typical licensing on server software.

How is this implemented? With Intel Speedstep being a thing, why would the processor speed ever be an input to any anti-piracy machine signature? Or is there some unique processor identifier?

I assume it's CPUID not frequency.

Are you saying the standard CPUJID registers are different between the two types of cores? I'd imagine that that would break a lot more software.

For example, you can read the cache configuration from CPUID and the different cores have different cache sizes. You can also detect hyperthreading using CPUID.

Does part of this involve the DRM "phoning home"? It gets confused and the central server says the game is being played on two PCs?

This is most certainly a check against either virtualization or the presence of a debugger observing the process. If the maximum performance of the core you're running on varies significantly over time, chances are that your process isn't running on its own in an OS running on bare metal and the extra layers give an attacker a chance to observe and reverse engineer the checks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com