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The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

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Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

#101

Post by cookiecaper »

jvdh wrote: post #25
jasonkester wrote: post #12

You missed Option 4, which is what will actually happen: 4. Make it easy to set up your own local game server and alter the hosts file on your machine to point to it. That is dead easy to do. I actually did it for the game FantasticContraption, not to steal it (it's well worth ten bucks. go try it: http://www.fantasticcontraption.com/ ), but because their server is so hopelessly overloaded at peak times that the game…

While I agree that this is probably what will happen, it is probably not going be as easy as you make it seem. There is a very good chance that in this case the entire conversation with the server will be encrypted. In order to emulate this, the encryption will have to be broken. That's hard enough as it is, and you also don't really know what the plaintext is.

They're encrypted with keys that your computer knows, or your computer wouldn't be able to read it. It's not too difficult to find that key and decrypt the information. Once you do that, it's just a matter of figuring out the way the info is sent. This would be pretty easy once the key is taken out.

Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

#102

Post by dandelany »

roc wrote: post #100
tptacek wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a valid point but it dodges the thrust of the post, which is that piracy is pushing the industry in this direction --- this is a mainstream title from a mainstream vendor that is making a clear and visible usability concession to protect the new release window from pirates. Most users probably won't care (remember that we're a disproportionately vocal minority --- or, you are; my job is to make these titles wo…

Piracy isn't pushing anyone anywhere. Publishers have it in their head that piracy equals lost sales. It's this belief , that DRM can recapture those sales, that is pushing them in this direction.

Sales of PC games, which are dead-easy to steal, dropped off sharply at right around the dawn of the Internet. Meanwhile, the market for console games, which have a much higher barrier to entry to pirate, is booming:

http://origin.arstechnica.com/news.media/video-game-sales-1....

Rightly or not, PC game makers have it in their heads that piracy is killing their business. I can see it both ways: On one hand, I find it hard to believe that not even a small fraction of computer game pirates would purchase more games if they couldn't easily steal them. But I also wonder if declining PC sales aren't just a byproduct of the "serious" gamers' shift towards preferring console games.

Regardless, the market for PC game sales has flatlined, and Ubisoft is trying desperately to jumpstart it by enacting a system that makes piracy significantly more difficult, at least for a little while. I'm sure they'll use the 3-4 months of nearly-zero piracy rates as a yardstick with which to measure the potential of the industry sans piracy. It will be interesting to see if you're right.

Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

#103

Post by vaksel »

ericbb wrote: post #96
vaksel wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

precisely, the only people stuff like this hurts are the legit users who pay the money. The hackers will rewrite the whole game if they have to, to make it free. It might take a little longer for them to release it...but can you honestly name a single game that hasn't been cracked?

From the article: Edit 2: One quick question for the "Anything can be cracked right away." crowd. Where do I get my cracked copy of World of Warcraft that can play the real game (not some cobbled together emulation server) without paying. Answer: You can't.

of course you can't play on Blizzard's servers...but you can still play on emulation servers.

And WoW is a web only game. Non-web games don't suffer from that.

Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

#104

Post by samd »

robryan wrote: post #93
samd wrote: post #45

Here's a solution no one seems to consider: make video games cheaper. $50-$60 is an outrageously high price for a game, especially when most of them are of forgettable quality. The people over at Valve/Steam have been saying the same thing, and they would know, they see the sales numbers; cutting prices for their weekend deals greatly increase sales. If companies brought game prices down to a reasonable level, say $2…

The question is though would they make up the difference on the volume, it really depends on the game. Games with the latest graphics and massive game worlds that take years to make do need to sell at a certain price to turn a decent profit. Selling everything around $30 would probably mean games would have to make do with smaller development budgets.

Steam said that when companies cut prices in half sales went up hundreds to thousands of percent. That's in dollars, not volume either. Sure some of the increased sales come from people who don't want to pass up the deal, but still, the numbers are compelling.

Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

#105

Post by rmorrison »

This would be one example where the DRY coding principle would backfire on them, at least for their purposes. If all of the Game Saving code funnels to one function, then the hackers may be able to relatively easily find and break just that function, and consequently the entire DRM.

Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

#106

Post by eru »

dandelany wrote: post #102
roc wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piracy isn't pushing anyone anywhere. Publishers have it in their head that piracy equals lost sales. It's this belief , that DRM can recapture those sales, that is pushing them in this direction.

Sales of PC games, which are dead-easy to steal, dropped off sharply at right around the dawn of the Internet. Meanwhile, the market for console games, which have a much higher barrier to entry to pirate, is booming: http://origin.arstechnica.com/news.media/video-game-sales-1.... Rightly or not, PC game makers have it in their heads that piracy is killing their business. I can see it both ways: On one hand, I find it…

> a byproduct of the "serious" gamers' shift towards preferring console games.

Or maybe the complete opposite: Casual gamer's are a much bigger audience than serious gamers. And PC games tend to be more serious. So the shift could be explained in this way, too.

(Just a hypothesis. Your argument has more going for it.)

Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

#107

Post by tptacek »

stcredzero wrote: post #89
tptacek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not settled computer science that the content protection problem always favors attackers, although it's clear that the state of the art does. I'm only reacting to the "laws of physics" comment you're making. It's not true that "if you can execute it, you can read it", at least for important definitions of "read" (that include "understand" or "modify"). Take, for an example, white box cryptography. Some problems…

What would be a summary of that part of "White Box Cryptography" which is new and distinct from the software obfuscation techniques that have been around for most of the history of programming? Is it more than just a bit of mathematical formalism applied to such? That's all I can tell at a first glance.

That's a hand-wavy comment. AES is just a bit of mathematical formalism away from XOR.

Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

#108

Post by eru »

pyre wrote: post #65
brown9-2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the type of "check at startup" that the article mentions hackers can easily null out?

Maybe game designers should take lessons from Skype in making it as hard as possible to disassemble/hack the binary.

Do you know why Skype is so keen on obfuscation?

Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

#109

Post by invisible »

What would probably work best is just allowing 200 installs per key (any more requires calling and pleading). Also, every 5 minutes the game sends something to the server and uses SSL to ensure it's communicating with the right server. This seems like an overly simple problem that isn't being approached right.

Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

#110

Post by stcredzero »

tptacek wrote: post #107
stcredzero wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be a summary of that part of "White Box Cryptography" which is new and distinct from the software obfuscation techniques that have been around for most of the history of programming? Is it more than just a bit of mathematical formalism applied to such? That's all I can tell at a first glance.

That's a hand-wavy comment. AES is just a bit of mathematical formalism away from XOR.

It's a legitimate question by a curious onlooker who's was just introduced to the whole concept of "White Box Cryptography." Apparently there's not a whole lot of proofs, though I perhaps it's plausible to get something useful proved.

Hopefully for it, your (non) answer is not telling.

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