SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Informative) by gnuman on Friday June 05 2015, @07:35PM
Game piracy is a real problem for independent game developers, especially on platforms like Android and Linux where reverse engineering games is quite easy.
CITATION NEEDED.
Furthermore, why do they think it is easier to reverse engineer on Linux as opposed to Windows? Sorry, but this doesn't pass smell test.
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.
I think maybe someone doesn't know of proper tools. Considering you can catch every single OpenGL function call along with its parameters, and emulate it, what is the point here? There are tools that will literally capture and replay OpenGL scenes, forwards, backwards and any which way so you can find bugs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2015, @07:57PM
It is easier in two respects.
First is the obvious s/easier/cheaper/ Super-powerful tools exist for all platforms, but Linux, by the nature of the people who use it, has most of them available for free. Windows not so much, at least for well known ones (and maybe the scene has secret ones or can otherwise get around licensing for the expensive ones).
Second is that with open source software and the like, it is easier to patch the kernel or otherwise know what is going on. Also, I believe that android uses some sort of intermediate bytecode, which requires even less work with common tools than to disassemble a compiled program.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2015, @01:06AM
But wait, isn't all FOSS simply a reimplementation of something that some hard working programmer or businessman designed, thus ripping off money from a working person? /sarcasm
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Friday June 05 2015, @11:33PM
Not to mention, at least from what I've seen, the indie devs aren't being "reverse engineered" they are being plain old knocked off. Hell look at companies like Zinga or King.com who have made fortunes literally just ripping off wholesale the designs of others games, no snatching off actual code is required.
Its the same thing we PC gamers have been seeing for awhile, Jim Sterling on YouTube practically has his channel dedicated to ripoffs and for every "war-z/day-z" ripoff you hear of there are a dozen that you don't. They have rip offs of everything from Minecraft to Tomb Raider and again no code stealing required, you merely have to make the name and the screencaps look enough like the original to fool the uneducated user just like mockbusters.
But I have to say as the "token Windows guy" that I am shocked, shocked I tell you! that nobody is bringing up the trend of FOSS projects embracing DRM? You have Valve building a DRM platform (SteamOS) on Linux, you have Firefox adding H.264 DRM, and now you have this, which if it keeps the user from doing what they want with their software? Well I don't think I really need to get a ruling from RMS, its DRM. Of course we Windows users really don't care as long as we get something good out of the deal, hence why Steam is so popular on Windows and why EA has been giving away games on Origin just to get users, but you would think the Linux faithful would scream bloody murder, so what gives?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2015, @05:36PM
Except that none of the projects you mention is by the "Linux faithful". Valve is hardly a FOSS project. And this is just a silly poc. One example doesn't make much much of trend.