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posted by CoolHand on Friday June 05 2015, @07:15PM   Printer-friendly

Game piracy is a real problem for independent game developers, especially on platforms like Android and Linux where reverse engineering games is quite easy.

To counter this, a simple method of using OpenGL to encrypt the assets such as images and data can be done by using the graphics card or GPU for performing the encryption/decryption work completely on the GPU, by using native OpenGL calls. This uses the already established General Purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing methodology to accomplish this task. A description of a proof-of-concept is available at Stealth Labs blog and the source code is available at github.

From stealthy.io:

Suppose you are an independent game developer. You are facing piracy and fake copies of your game, and you do not have the legal and economic power to handle this problem. You want to continue making games without getting discouraged by pirates, who most likely reside in other countries. What do you do ? How do you prevent or reduce the incentive to pirate your game through reverse engineering ? Maybe you could perform encryption of your game assets, like textures, shaders and images, to thwart the piracy and copy-cat efforts ? You could use standard encryption libraries like OpenSSL, but that still leaves the decrypted data open to access, in CPU memory, by anyone running a debugger on your software. What if you could use OpenGL to do the encryption and leave the data in the framebuffer object and render it from there using OpenGL itself ? Then you would never have to even extract the data from GPU memory into CPU memory ! Debugging tools for OpenGL are not good enough, and reverse engineering tools for OpenGL are non-existent.


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  • (Score: 2) by jimshatt on Friday June 05 2015, @07:33PM

    by jimshatt (978) on Friday June 05 2015, @07:33PM (#192645) Journal
    Why is it easier to reverse engineer on Linux and Android?
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by middlemen on Friday June 05 2015, @07:41PM

    by middlemen (504) on Friday June 05 2015, @07:41PM (#192651) Homepage

    Android has most apps using Dalvik bytecode: androguard, dex2jar, dare are some of the decompilers that can literally decompile all your Android apps at the price point of $0. Refer Android Hacker's Handbook [wiley.com].

    Linux has radare [radare.org] and many other in-built tools to ease reverse engineering at the price point of $0.

    In contrast, Windows requires you to purchase something like IDA Pro [hex-rays.com] which costs about $2500 or more per license.

    And iOS has iOS Hacker's Handbook [wiley.com] which also requires IDA Pro, an iPhone, a Mac and various other tools including being able to jailbreak the iPhone.

    Compared to Windows/iOS, reverse engineering on Linux especially on Android is a walk in the park.
     

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2015, @08:25PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2015, @08:25PM (#192670)

      Radar works on Windows, Mac OS too

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2015, @09:44PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2015, @09:44PM (#192685)

      In contrast, Windows requires you to purchase something like IDA Pro [hex-rays.com] which costs about $2500 or more per license.

      And that would stop people who make it their bussiness to remove copy protection... how exactly? You can find IDA Pro on TPB or your favorite hive of scum and villainy of choice.

      And it's not as if there aren't free serviceable alternatives [ollydbg.de].

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2015, @05:24AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2015, @05:24AM (#192797)

        OllyDbg, while nice, has nowhere near the functionality of IDA Pro. Nothing does, period. Honestly most people pirate it, and the people who are not willing to do that use the IDA free version.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @04:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @04:43PM (#193287)

      [....]"In contrast, Windows requires you to purchase something like IDA Pro [hex-rays.com] which costs about $2500 or more per license."[....]

      because pirates are well known to maintain their paid licenses for reverse engineering software ┌∩┐(ಠ͜ʖಠ)┌∩┐
      https://thepiratebay.se/search/ida%20pro/ [thepiratebay.se]