ROM Hack New save encryption discovered in Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon!

[Platinum Lucario]

Hi everyone. I'd just like to report that I have discovered that there's a 3DS game that uses a (maybe new?) type of save data encryption. It's Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon!

Seeing as this has never been mentioned anywhere online, I guess I'm the first person to discover this, am I wrong?

I tested this between two different 3DS firmware versions, one that had sysNAND at 9.2.0, and the emuNAND at 10.7.0 when I extracted the save data from Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon and put it onto the Gateway card, and played Super Mystery Dungeon. And guess what happened? The game complained that the data was corrupt!

So I tested the retail game card in emuNAND Classic Mode, and to my big discovery... the game didn't complain.

So apparently, there's a new save encryption, in which every game card has a unique encryption key stored on one of it's chips. So that means if the save file is taken out of the game card (even if it uses the same ROM that is extracted from the game card), it's unable to use that unique save encryption key anymore. Meaning anyone using Gateway cannot transfer saves anymore, nor can they distribute them to other people, nor can they even dump them and play them in Gateway mode without the game thinking the data is corrupt and deleting all the data.

The firmware that the retail game card has for updating is 10.2.0-20E (for Europe and Australia).

So I'm guessing every retail game card that is made from that point on will end up with unique save encryption keys in which are unique to every game card. Even if it's the same Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon in Australia with another one in Australia will both have different hidden save encryption keys in them, both unique to their manufactured game card.

I just hope there's some way of extracting the keys from the game card in the future, and a way to decrypt them, so save files can be shared.

 

[MsMidnight]

We know it uses newer save encryption