Will software become impenetrable in the future?

lefthandsword

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I have been researching the cat and mouse game that hardware manufacturers and hackers/users have been playing since the dawn of consumer electronics.

But the cat doesn't things easy for us as companies learn from their mistakes and introducing more security migrations in the meanwhile, I'm concerned about the future of underground hacking scenes as Intel has plans of thwarting ROP (which most modern hacks rely on) though architectural changes, it will most likely be implemented in ARM as well if it all goes well like SMEP was introduced in ARMv8 as PXN a few years back.

Is it just a matter of time before the cat has the ultimate victory as we have software that are practically impenetrable (aka unhackable) for everyone but the most devoted malware authors?

This forum and and other underground scenes are great, but those days are probably coming to an end in the foreseeable future.
 
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lefthandsword

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History has taught us that nothing "unbreakable" exists, it's just a matter of time and ingenuity. (look at the Sega Saturn hax, released some 20 years later)
By 'practically' the time it's blown open the development community around that hardware is probably dead or become very niche like the Wii U scene right now.
 

raulpica

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By 'practically' the time it's blown open the development community around that hardware is probably dead or become very niche like the Wii U scene right now.
Well, yes, look at Denuvo. It's not unbreakable, but it delays stuff long enough that piracy rates are now drastically lower for big budget games.
 

The Real Jdbye

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I have been researching the cat and mouse game that hardware manufacturers and hackers/users have been playing since the dawn of consumer electronics.

But the cat doesn't things easy for us as companies learn from their mistakes and introducing more security migrations in the meanwhile, I'm concerned about the future of underground hacking scenes as Intel has plans of thwarting ROP (which most modern hacks rely on) though architectural changes, it will most likely be implemented in ARM as well if it all goes well like SMEP was introduced in ARMv8 as PXN a few years back.

Is it just a matter of time before the cat has the ultimate victory as we have software that are practically impenetrable (aka unhackable) for everyone but the most devoted malware authors?

This forum and and other underground scenes are great, but those days are probably coming to an end in the foreseeable future.
3DM seems to think so. An excerpt from Wikipedia: "In January 2016, 3DM reportedly nearly gave up attempting to crack Just Cause 3, which is protected with Denuvo, due to the difficulties associated with the process. They also warned that due to the current trends in encryption technology, in two years' time, the cracking of video games may become impossible."
Personally, I think that as long as there are skilled people dedicated to working on cracking software/hardware, it will eventually be accomplished. But it might become so difficult that everyone just gives up.
 

raulpica

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3DM seems to think so. An excerpt from Wikipedia: "In January 2016, 3DM reportedly nearly gave up attempting to crack Just Cause 3, which is protected with Denuvo, due to the difficulties associated with the process. They also warned that due to the current trends in encryption technology, in two years' time, the cracking of video games may become impossible."
Personally, I think that as long as there are skilled people dedicated to working on cracking software/hardware, it will eventually be accomplished. But it might become so difficult that everyone just gives up.
3DM was just lazy, as shown by CONSPIR4CY a few months later: https://torrentfreak.com/denuvo-properly-cracked-rise-of-the-tomb-raider-first-victim-160809/
 

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They may have been lazy, but I assumed it was to avoid an arms race. Instead let the companies think they have won, all the developers move on and when they have to recruit again then the knowledge has been lost.

It looks like they didn't wait long enough.....

http://www.geek.com/games/denuvos-g...rack-so-a-hacker-bypassed-it-instead-1665779/

Apparently it's patched now, so it doesn't work anymore.
 
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zoogie

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It seems like as software becomes more complex, layered, and abstracted, the more of an attack surface opens to vulnerability research. Increased hardware security mitigates this somewhat, but it seems hackers always have an answer.
 

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It seems like as software becomes more complex, layered, and abstracted, the more of an attack surface opens to vulnerability research. Increased hardware security mitigates this somewhat, but it seems hackers always have an answer.
I'm curious to see how these geniuses will tackle CET, but I think logic flaw vulnerabilities will be the new black.
 

DinohScene

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Yifan said the Vita is perhaps the most secure device there is as of now.
Yet, it's hacked.

No, things will always be hacked.
Soft and hardware.
It's just a matter of time.
 
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FAST6191

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There are varying views.
Some of the online based stuff, which is to say remote storage and processing might change things towards it being near impossible to crack. Something done remotely in a black box I can't look at is very hard to crack.

I have said before I don't envy those coming up now, at the same time though the stuff available to people today is crazy and hypothetical 80s hacker me would have killed for some of the tools available today.

The question might then become do you want some piracy?

Equally so you make a magic walled garden where nobody can so much as do an operation out of place, possibly even dealing with https://xkcd.com/505/ and this. Won't someone else want to play it a bit more fast and loose*? Computers are not hard things to make, people have done it before and the world has shown that when all is said and done you can do a lot with a simple possibly sub GHz ARM core and less than a gig of memory.

Give or take the following anyway


*I want emulation, I might want to keep my source closed, my data has to be handled a certain way because laws, I hold the radical view that it is not the end of the world if a 9 year old sees a naked breast, this payment lark I prefer to handle another way...
 

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