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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

There are cracked Denuvo games, and no anti-piracy scheme is unbreakable, ever.

If it can run on your PC when copy-protected, it means at some point the CPU executed the right instructions, so a crack is always possible to create. It's just a matter of how much effort and time is it to reverse-engineer it. You cannot copy-protect software indefinitely.

I remember feeling cool as fuck as a teenager because I cracked GTA 3 by dumping the live memory of the binary post decryption. Of course it's been 25 years, so the status quo has improved by a lot and god knows how many man-years and kWh are wasted on copy protection.

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Technically some CPUs support secure enclaves that should support end to end encryption which should be robust short of lifting the encryption keys from the die. In practice things like SGX have been full of holes.

Even assuming those are flawless, lifting keys is still O(n) in the key size, and the battle is just increasing the constant factor enough to make it unattractive. The problem is that lifting keys is attractive for reasons much more valuable than game cracking, so after a few years they should always be assumed compromised.

X-box is unbreakable.

So was the PS3, until it wasn’t.

but afaik, we still don't have a break on xbox one released 2013 - 12 years later.

I love this presentation by a Microsoft person on the security aspects of the Xbox One: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo

Perhaps it's just that xbox is irrelevant, when you have PC and Playstation?

To me, Xbox is that video-game you get when you ask for a Playstation and your parents don't understand video-games. Their versioning scheme even helps make sure the parents fail to purchase the latest generation.

The two main things that people jailbreak consoles for are dumping games to emulate on PC and running homebrew. Microsoft explicitly supports the latter use case with Dev mode and for all but a couple games (only Halo 5 nowadays?) explicitly supports the former use case by releasing their games on Steam and skipping the emulation bits. So there is little interest in hacking the Xbox consoles now. Yet I think someone still has managed in the past year to get decrypted game dumps from both XOne and Series X.

there has been one recently that led to the dumping of games on xbox one and série and the beginning of emulation projects

To be fair, it has no games either.

people lost interest in hacking the xbox after dev mode was introduced to run custom apps

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