Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 123 posts

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

#61

Post by lutorm »

X3 Terran Conflict had an annoying, disruptive DRM that only allowed you to install the game 5 times and would count any significant change in hardware config as a new machine. When I got more memory and had to return them, plus reinstalled my OS, I used up 4/5 in the first two weeks.

Normally, I wouldn't touch this with a five-foot pole, given that it puts me at the mercy of them having their servers up to give me a new license just to play my own game. But they did something really reasonable:

After 9 months or so, they released a patch to remove the DRM.

That seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

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

#62

Post by lmkg »

The author seems to assume that being hard to crack will be a discouragement. The people cracking games are hackers. For a significant chunk of them, the game being difficult gives the draw of being an interesting challenge, as well as a way of getting street cred in the cracking community.

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

#63

Post by fragmede »

cabalamat wrote: post #39

The solution to onerous DRM is: just don't buy any product using it. No-one needs to buy Assassin's Creed II; there are plenty of other computer games out there.

How about the DRM on the Xbox and PS 3 version of the game? 'Same' game, but it is instead a vote for locked-down 'computing'. For those who do need to buy ACII.

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

#65

Post by pyre »

brown9-2 wrote: post #33
jskinner wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the original binary doesn't need to be modified in any way It's easy for Ubisoft to also force the binary to be cracked: have the client request the server sign a random token with its private key, and verify it with a public key embedded into the client. This way a third party server could only be written if the client was also cracked to either change the key or remove the check.

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.

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

#66

Post by pyre »

pvg wrote: post #23
JeffL wrote: post #9

Or you could just disable the save game feature and then run it inside a virtual windows machine where you just save the state of the machine. =)

It's a 'checkpoint' system. Save game or not, the game is constantly checking with Ubisoft's servers - if it can't talk to them it just boots you out. The save thing is a bit of a red herring.

How does that work though? Can't the points where that check is called just be hex-edited to NOOP in the binary? The point of the article was that taking non-trivial portions of the game logic out of the game and pushing them to the server makes it harder to crack the system. Unless the game is constantly getting information from Ubisoft's servers that it needs to function (i.e. save-game logic, AI logic, etc), then the "verify with the server" code can just be ignored in a hacked binary.

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

#67

Post by pyre »

tptacek wrote: post #30
jvdh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many of the major game protocols are not only encrypted, but are extremely complex and irregular. They're absolutely no fun to reverse.

Though it's sad that the 'extremely complex and irregular' part is probably not by design, but due to haphazardly adding features just to push out a product.

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

#68

Post by Psyonic »

metamemetics wrote: post #59
tumult wrote: post #7

1. Make your own, free saved game server and alter the application code to use it. This means a lot of work and expense, both to duplicate Ubisoft's game saving code and to set up and maintain the servers. Won't happen. I'm not even a very good game hacker, and I've done much more dramatic things. It's really not a huge deal. People have reverse-engineered entire online game protocols in order to have their own unoff…

" their own unofficial servers before the games were even out of beta." Now here's a real challenge: Starcraft 2 beta server

There are people working on it... whether or not they will succeed, I can't say, but considering that fake WoW servers exist, I'm guessing they'll pull it off eventually.

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

DarkShikari wrote: post #35

"Probably work"? It was already cracked two weeks before release! From a few days ago on Buzz: Just saw a post on the Steam Forum for Assassin's Creed 2 that the impossible to beat, always online, can't save your game or even play the stupid thing without being connected to the internet DRM for it has already been cracked 2 weeks before its release. sigh Did Ubisoft really expect this to work any better than previous…

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by vaksel »

DarkShikari wrote: post #35

"Probably work"? It was already cracked two weeks before release! From a few days ago on Buzz: Just saw a post on the Steam Forum for Assassin's Creed 2 that the impossible to beat, always online, can't save your game or even play the stupid thing without being connected to the internet DRM for it has already been cracked 2 weeks before its release. sigh Did Ubisoft really expect this to work any better than previous…

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?

Post reply on HN