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Denuvo update blocks hypervisor bypass used to crack PC games

Denuvo update blocks hypervisor bypass used to crack PC games

Denuvo appears to have been updated and the hypervisor bypass that has been used to crack dozens of games no longer works if recent reports are to be believed.

The reports state that Star Wars: Galactic Racer remains uncracked several days after launch, suggesting the game ships with the latest edition of the DRM software built to close the loophole that previously cracked Denuvo-secured games wide-open.

Once again, this appears to be causing issues for legitimate players as Steam reviews are reporting issues with the game from crashing outright on startup to other hiccups once in game.

The ongoing lawsuit against hacker voices38 - the anonymous individual involved in the Denuvo cracking situation continues, with Denuvo having filed subpoenas against Discord, Reddit, Valve, and Microsoft to try and unmask and help identify them across the platforms.

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Lop1 said:
Well, it is a problem that people are choosing to just not buy a thing, whatever reason they have. If nobody was paying, nobody would make anything. That is the logical conclusion of it.

DRMs like this however, are certainly not a solution, especially when those who don't pay a cent, get measurably better and simpler experience. I imagine practices like this, are a net negative on sales, not a positive.
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Nobody contested that. Point is simply mislabeling to make pirating worse in the eyes of common folk, than it actually is.

No different from the moral outrage about violence in video games all those years ago on that front, where religious zealots were trying to make people believe, if your children played Mortal Kombat, that they would turn into violent criminals.
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My question being to that would be how could these corperations make any better sequals if they considered piracy as not theft and just handed it out to everyone stating yeah you can just pirate it.
 
K3Nv4 said:
My question being to that would be how could these corperations make any better sequals if they considered piracy as not theft and just handed it out to everyone stating yeah you can just pirate it.
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I don't see the point of that question. Piracy not being theft, does not prevent them from putting measures against it. Piracy itself has been made illegal decades ago, with DMCA, DRMs have existed for a bit less than that.

From what I can tell, you are arguing from the point of the logical conclusion of piracy being the default and even legal way of obtaining media that is currently sold, but nobody is advocating for that, nor would it ever happen. People are willing to pay for stuff they find worth the money, if they have the means to.

Besides that, the only thing I had contested and am against is calling piracy something that it isn't and cannot be, unless we severely twist what the word 'theft' means.

The only thing from a legal framework, where piracy imo, should be completely legal, is in cases of totally abandoned and officially inaccessible media. But that wouldn't be piracy anymore obviously, since by law, copies would be completely free to be made and distributed. I am going off topic there, just wanted to air that thought out, as something that would be incredibly positive from a standpoint of media preservation.
 
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Lop1 said:
I don't see the point of that question. Piracy not being theft, does not prevent them from putting measures against it. Piracy itself has been made illegal decades ago, with DMCA, DRMs have existed for a bit less than that.

From what I can tell, you are arguing from the point of the logical conclusion of piracy being the default and even legal way of obtaining media that is currently sold, but nobody is advocating for that, nor would it ever happen. People are willing to pay for stuff they find worth the money, if they have the means to.

Besides that, the only thing I had contested and am against is calling piracy something that it isn't and cannot be, unless we severely twist what the word 'theft' means.

The only thing from a legal framework, where piracy imo, should be completely legal, is in cases of totally abandoned and officially inaccessible media. But that wouldn't be piracy anymore obviously, since by law, copies would be completely free to be made and distributed. I am going off topic there, just wanted to air that thought out, as something that would be incredibly positive from a standpoint of media preservation.
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I do agree after some time to where they are not making any money it should be considered freeware and uploaded at any place people choose to share it. But this is the main issue with why they want to go after people like voices38 because he is finding ways past protection that is causing money losses from current titles. This is where it could fall under theft.
 
K3Nv4 said:
I do agree after some time to where they are not making any money it should be considered freeware and uploaded at any place people choose to share it. But this is the main issue with why they want to go after people like voices38 because he is finding ways past protection that is causing money losses from current titles. This is where it could fall under theft.
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As I said already, it's not theft, but it is still illegal, just under different naming and framework.

As for the lawsuit against voices, it's not even video game publishers who are trying to get him either, but Irdeto itself, who are providing Denuvo to publishers. Ig they could argue a loss, due to voices making their product less appealing to publishers and devs and if they stated that was the reason that they didn't employ their services........ig it could work? I am not entirely sure what angle Irdeto is going for, but doesn't matter much to us either way.

As for piracy itself being a loss of sales......hard to prove tbh. You can easily argue that those that pirate, would not have bought the game in the first place, or that mere inclusion of aggressive DRMs like this, made people NOT purchase the title at all, because it's objectively an inferior product to a pirated copy.

Then there is that EU study, I mentioned in one of the posts above. It's a really hard thing to really prove.

But such a thing is unlikely to be tested in court, due to sheer uncertainty of it, nor it's really what should we be concerned with at all.
 
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bonkmaykr said:
Time to throw another coin in the "Andrew Tannenbaum was right again" jar if this happens, because it is guaranteed it will be used as a backdoor. A highly obfuscated, complex, and proprietary networked program living inside the kernel... what could go wrong?

I believe a large part of why Denuvo is allowed to exist is due to the majority of customers who simply never notice it is there. This would not hold up for long when you start requiring early kernel modules.

It's all completely superfluous bullshit anyway. It never ever stops hackers. Microsoft "making some changes to Windows" can't solve this because the whole idea of "trusted computing" is stupid from the get-go, and requires you to no longer own your own hardware to be effective. Look no further than Widevine Level 1 - which ALSO doesn't do fuck all, but that's the direction we are going.

I'm convinced anticheat and DRM companies are just scam artists that know their products are rubbish, but developers buy from them anyway because they are told that an amicable relationship with their customers can't be trusted. If you go to the Denuvo website it is FILLED with defensive marketing reminiscent of a dictator spinning the news in his favor. DRM vendors always play dirty and deceitful when they lose, because pretending they always win is how they stay in business.

EDIT: I cannot find the page anymore, but Denuvo used to have a whole blog article making up excuses for why their software definitely doesn't suck.
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What i meant by microsoft finally stepping in
Is locking everyone out the kernel and providing some actual secure runtime environments on PC. A few AC devs have stated if MS actually stepped in more with windows security the need for a lot of the heavy handed AC wouldnt be around.

Short explanation Kernel AC wouldn't need to be thing if kernel cheats also were not a thing.

MacOS removed kernel access via KEXT years ago and replaced it with system extensions that functionally do the same thing devs need. Anything trying to obtain kernel access not made by Apple themselves is treated as malware or you must deliberately disable security functions and programs have a way to tell when this was done and lock out. Thus You don't have crowdstike situations.

If this happened with windows most kernel cheats would cease to exist. You could also extend this to making denuvo irrelevant
 
Renos44 said:
providing some actual secure runtime environments on PC. A few AC devs have stated if MS actually stepped in more with windows security the need for a lot of the heavy handed AC wouldnt be around.
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This is what I was talking about. This would never work.

You are not owed 100% control over what someone else's machine does. This is cybersecurity 101, you never trust network clients. The second they have the data it is able to be copied and modified no matter how many obstacles you put up.

The alternative is a "chain of trust" system which must be implemented in hardware paired with proprietary software. Which also doesn't work, see: Xbox 360, PlayStation Vita, Widevine Level 1...

Then you have cloud computing, which would work only for video games as you wouldn't be able to reconstruct the software just from a lossy copy of its input and output. Once you accomplish that you have truly killed copying, and killed preservation efforts in the process. Which, as an aside, kills your chances of future profit from that work because corporations are dog shit at backing up their releases.

In every case, your customers get a worse experience. In all but the most extreme theoretical implementations as I mentioned above, it stops nothing and copying wins.

Renos44 said:
Short explanation Kernel AC wouldn't need to be thing if kernel cheats also were not a thing.

MacOS removed kernel access via KEXT years ago and replaced it with system extensions that functionally do the same thing devs need. Anything trying to obtain kernel access not made by Apple themselves is treated as malware or you must deliberately disable security functions and programs have a way to tell when this was done and lock out. Thus You don't have crowdstike situations.

If this happened with windows most kernel cheats would cease to exist. You could also extend this to making denuvo irrelevant
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You are conflating protecting the end user with protecting against the end user. Repelling third party developers from getting root access willy nilly is a security measure AGAINST these DRM implementations, not FOR them.

What you are describing only works to make DRM inconvenient and therefore impractical from a business perspective. It doesn't prevent kernel modifications from running completely and never will, for the same reason that kernel level DRM has never worked: the computer is not theirs. The user always has control and can install whatever the hell they want. Hackers will simply instruct users on how to get around this, as they already do when providing jailbreaks for consoles. A typical gamer who isn't trying to break things won't be as motivated to do this so your DRM completely falls apart. You now rely on the OS to prevent your files from being copied or modified, which brings us back to square one: the OS is under the user's control if it is on their machine.

No matter how you approach this, DRM and anticheat cannot function as intended. It is a lie sold to both you and to the developers of your games, to prop up an industry of black hat engineers that write malware to bully customers with. Because no real programmer or hacker believes in DRM. You don't get as deep into the gaming industry with your computer science knowledge as Denuvo has, writing all of those expensive custom tools, if you are naïve enough to believe DRM works.

CMDreamer said:
Thank you both!

I don't buy on Steam, so I'm safe... :rofl2:
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Denuvo can exist anywhere.

PCGamingWiki usually will tell you if a game has it.
 
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CMDreamer said:
I don't buy on Steam, so I'm safe... :rofl2:
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TBF it's not just steam, it's just convenient to check for Denuvo using it. It's the publisher that usually decides to use Denuvo, Sega is a big one for example, so anywhere you can buy their games on PC, they'll have denuvo no matter what.

Until they remove it, which is getting more and more common because...well, the cat can't quite catch the mouse it seems.
 
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Square Enix normally removes Denuvo after 6 months of the games released. And by that time those games would be on sales as well. So there's that.
 
bonkmaykr said:
"Rightful owner"... Uh-huh.

This mindset is why people who pay for games legally are constantly screwed over while people who copy them actually get the goods they would've otherwise paid for.

This "I own it and nobody else can have it" direction is self-destructive and helps nobody. If you want customers that stick by you, you acknowledge that copying is not a threat if you provide something people WANT to pay for. Stop seeing commercial art as property, and start seeing it as a symbiotic relationship. That is not difficult to do.

Trying to apply "theft" or even the word "piracy" to art is antagonistic anti-consumer language normalized by people who stand to benefit from your belief in it.

I'll save the Free Software rabbithole for another time, this approach applies to proprietary work too. What we are talking about is beyond just monopoly over your own creative work (which 99% of the time is just abused by publishers to snuff out fair competition anyway), but literally denying your customers your end of the agreement.
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Tip, don't waste your time arguing with industry shills. They'll never learn, and they pretend to be against the capitalist agenda but they are 100% for it in every way.
 

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