Good day. Here I decided to describe the history of human greed and cunning, the history of human resourcefulness, the history of game piracy. In this blog I will describe in detail the means of protecting games on a PC, and I will only touch on consoles superficially, since their protection is sophisticated and complex.
My story begins in the seventies. Games were still released on cassettes back then. You don’t need to be a super hacker to copy a game on such a medium. To do this you only needed to have Datasette. He copied the contents of the tapes.
But the developers quickly came to their senses and introduced protection. For example, the downloader had its own code that used a non-standard playback speed. Sometimes when starting the game the user was asked to enter a word specified in the manual.
A sophisticated and truly demonic method was the use of a Lenslok device: a set of plastic prisms in a case that were distributed along with the game. When launched, an encrypted word appeared on the screen, and then the prisms came into play. The player had to put them on the screen and decipher the inscription, and only then did he gain access to the game.
Progress does not stand still, and audio cassettes are being replaced by floppy disks. Publishers are improving the previous security system and calling it Read The Manual. Essentially this is the same key in the instructions, only with some changes. We changed the location of the key request; if previously we were asked to enter it before starting the game itself, now we were allowed to go through half (or a little less) and were asked for the key. The manual itself has also changed, it has become more colorful and interesting.
With a new medium comes a fundamentally new era. The discs needed to be protected from copying, and the publishers immediately did this. A special label was applied to each disk, which the game subsequently accessed, and if it was not there, the product refused to launch. Such a mark could only be placed when printing the disc itself at the factory. It was not possible to transmit it at home. But the hackers didn’t need to do this at all; it was enough to ensure that the game did not access this label, but started immediately.
And at the beginning of the two thousandth year, pirated disks of the company “Fargus» flooded the markets.
Over time, pirates learned sugar-bingo-casino.co.uk to cope with protection so deftly and quickly that copies of games began to appear on the markets simultaneously with the release of the official version.
The developers couldn’t leave it like that and gave the world a new protection. It analyzed the physical state of the CD without setting labels, prevented the contents of the disc from being copied, and prevented hackers from accessing the game code. In Russia she was known as StarForce, and became foreign analogues SecuRom And SafeDisc. But now we’ll talk about the domestic protection system, it has made life much more difficult for the players. There were many reasons.
Firstly,StarForce required the constant presence of the disk, which caused it to wear out, and a sensitive security system recognized it as illegal. Moreover, even a minor scratch could make a disc pirated.Secondly, in later versions StarForce a driver was installed on the computer that protected the media from emulation. The problem with the driver was that it conflicted with some CD drives, which caused the operating system to glitch, and the driver also punched a hole in the PC’s security. However StarForce did not last long, and discs with games began to be emulated, and with high-speed Internet, emulation became a real nightmare for developers. Everyone could download the game and install it completely free of charge.
This time, publishers began to catch up, because pirates had been using the Internet for a long time, downloading and posting games on the World Wide Web without any problems. The developers followed the example of hackers and also posted their games online. It was then that digital copies and Internet activation appeared. Of course, such a system was not ideal and initially caused many problems, but with the advent Steam the situation has changed, many errors and inconveniences have disappeared.
Now, in addition to Internet activation, developers use a content encryption system so that hackers cannot create a “crack/tablet”. However, this did not stop piracy.
A short introduction.
Both consoles are built on a processor architecture Cell. But Xbox 360 three cores, and PlayStation 3 there are eight of them. The processor uses e technologyFuse (Electronic fuse). You probably know how a regular fuse works, if not, look under the spoiler.
The fuse is designed to pass a certain current, for example 1 Ampere. If a current of 2 Amps or more passes through it, the wire will overheat and break. Exactly the same fuses, only nano, are used in Cell processors.
Microsoft I figured out how to use technology eFuse as an encryption key. And she achieved this in the following way. Microsoft burned some fuses, and it turned out that the burnt one means zero, and the whole one means one. Together they represent the binary sequence. 128 such fuses are a 128-bit encryption key. It is used to decrypt game data. Namely, the digital signature, which Microsoft signs all his games.
In theory, because of her Xbox will never run unsigned third party applications. But hackers still hacked the console. They made a program that forces the processor to enter emergency mode. And there, for diagnostic purposes, any program without a digital signature can be launched.
PlayStation 3
Now let’s consider PlayStation. Its security system is no less complex than that of Xbox. So what is in the eighth core?? Lives there hypervisor. Essentially, this is a virtual machine that encrypts and decrypts all information flows. That’s why hackers couldn’t hack the console for so long. But Sony after all lost with gravy made a mistake. The oversight is hardware in nature on all consoles that came from the factory with firmware no older than 3.55.
But in contrast to Microsoft Sony corrected the situation, and consoles with firmware 3.56 and older were never hacked.
Small summary.
Piracy has plagued developers for decades. Although, no, it doesn’t pursue, but goes hand in hand. It’s like good and evil, Max and Kostya, ice and fire. Without one there can be no other. I’ll end on this philosophical note. Buy good games.