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Game studios that use digital rights management (DRM) tools tend to defend it to the death, even after it's been cracked. It prevents 'casual' piracy and cheating, they sometimes argue. However, Rime developer Tequila Works is taking a decidedly different approach. It claims that it'll remove Denuvo, the anti-tampering/DRM system on the Windows version of Rime, if someone cracks its island puzzle title. This is an odd promise to make, especially since it amounts to an inadvertent dare -- find a way to break in and the developers will eliminate the need for that crack.
This wouldn't be so unusual a statement if there weren't a history of Denuvo cracks. While it's harder to defeat this code than earlier schemes, it's definitely not impossible. Recent games like Resident Evil 7 and Prey had their Denuvo implementations broken within days of release, while developers have patched it out on titles like Doom and Inside. Tequila Works is aware that cracking is likely more a question of "when" than "if," but it appears to be optimistic about the challenge involved.
Source: ArsTechnica
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Wootery on Tuesday May 30 2017, @08:37AM
They'll likely use other tricks too. Skype, for instance, tries to detect the presence of a debugger and will refuse to play ball if it thinks it's being analysed. It also tries to break the way debugger breakpoints work, encrypts the interesting parts of its native code, tries to detect changes being made to its native code, and fills its native code space with 'junk' to bury the needle in a haystack. Source. [oklabs.net]
It's also possible to make use of a bytecode interpreter to make analysis more difficult. Somewhat related: the original Xbox made use of an interpreter in its boot process. The idea was that Microsoft knew that 'attackers' wouldn't easily be able to change the small amount of data held in the Xbox's relatively-secure (but very small) ROM, but would be able to change everything else, so their strategy was to write a small interpreter for a p-code which couldn't be used to do anything naughty, then write their boot code in the insecurely-stored p-code. Source. [mborgerson.com]