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quadisys

Member Since 17 Oct 2012
Offline Last Active Oct 29 2012 03:39 AM
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Posts I've Made

In Topic: Is software piracy a problem for you?

27 October 2012 - 04:33 AM

View PostSol_HSA, on 26 October 2012 - 05:45 AM, said:

I don't think you've mentioned an url at any point. Googling for quadisys gets some unrelated company.
You're right, I didn't. It's that we are now in Silicon Valley and have a lot of stuff to do so it takes time. I'll post all details once it's done. Actually, what are doing here is to collect people's opinion, be it positive or negative ones, to make our message as clear as possible.

In Topic: Is software piracy a problem for you?

25 October 2012 - 07:16 PM

View PostStainless, on 24 October 2012 - 10:05 AM, said:

Your random number generator, there are no real random number generators in software, so if the algorithm is known (or can be derived) that is a potential weak point
The random generator has really only a minor role in whole process. It's not about ciphering based on that or whatever else.

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Anything sent over a network is public, if the data packets are captured and recorded for a valid game, will that give enough data for an attack?
There are two things sent over network: your hardware info (to our server) and the final executable (back to you). Both of these are public. You can hack the hardware info file (and to "lock" it for another hardware under your s/n) but what's the point? Our website will allow you to do the same, no need to hack the hwinfo format at all.

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Honestly if you want this technology to be treated seriously, I would set up some form of peer review and let people try it out.
One step at time :) There will be a public crack challenge, everybody is invited, I'll post about it here too, don't worry.

In Topic: Is software piracy a problem for you?

25 October 2012 - 07:10 PM

View PostStainless, on 23 October 2012 - 11:32 PM, said:

All you can hope to do is delay the hackers long enough that you have already made your money out of the game by the time they have hacked it.
I guess my English is really broken as this is exactly thing I'm trying to repeat here again and again. Our technology is built on this premise.

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You say that your technique can be added to thousands of locations in the code, fine so I go out and buy a load of raspberry pi's and put them together into an array and set that off on the problem. For about $3000 you have a machine capable of a huge number of calculations per second, with some clever code I bet it will be able to do a game in a day.
You still don't understand. Maybe I should invent a smarter term than the 'crypto point' as the point lies completely elsewhere. We don't say it's computationally complex. We say that's there are some control points, which are well hidden for any kind of automation approach and that you, you as a person - pirate, need to find & debug & remove it manually. Every one of them.

In Topic: Is software piracy a problem for you?

25 October 2012 - 06:51 PM

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First off, the approach to copy protection seems grounded on a very good point: instead of making cracking "impossible", make it boring and time-consuming.
Beware, crowd will beat you up for this kind of comments! ;-)

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Second, you could try "protecting" some tools benchmarkers use - like some 3dmark or some of the games used to benchmark new hardware these days. The results from those would probably soothe (or confirm) some of the
concerns from the folk in here.
Hey, that's pretty cool idea! It's public, it's reliable, a perfect test case. We'll do some tests and publish it on our website ASAP.

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Third, files are on your servers. Can they handle AAA title launch traffic?
By the nature of our protection, we don't need to do any magic stuff there. It's more like a reliable file server with multiple downloads. We outsourced this task to one of the best companies in our country to handle this, so in this matter I'm pretty confident.

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Fourth, if the game gets cracked within N days, will you give the developer full refund?
As I mentioned somewhere else we charge them per activation. So, in case the game gets cracked, obviously "no one" would be interested in activation on our servers anymore => you wont get charged as well.

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The primary concern I have is the randomity of the thing - if I have a game project with its million lines of code, and I carefully list functions that shouldn't get instrumented (which would probably be around ~80% of the whole codebase), it's still possible I miss something that, when slowed down, causes issues. And since this is a random process, some customers have the issues and others don't. No amount of testing will conclusively say your solution won't cause issues for me.
Actually, we'll make your make job much easier. Sure, you can tell us that these function are most important / optimized. But if you still don't feel good about the result, we have a tool (I guess we could spread this tool among publishers) which analyzes the most used / most called code and we can tell you what functions should be avoided or we will do that by ourselves, obviously.

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If some checksum failed, the game didn't die, but instead removed some keys (or coins or gems or whatever) that you had to collect to advance - so to validate your crack, you had to play the game for hours.
We do exactly the same, as those control points are randomly spread, it's very well possible the last control point gets discovered in the very last level :)

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In retrospect the developers could have included hardware checks later on, like at the start of each level, to make cracking even harder.
Sure. We learn from mistakes and although we had no idea about Dreamcast, we figured out that we can't have one single deep throat else we're doomed.

In Topic: Is software piracy a problem for you?

25 October 2012 - 06:31 PM

View Post}:+()___ (Smile), on 24 October 2012 - 09:06 AM, said:

I think, most vulnerable part of such DRM scheme is the process of getting hardware id. Cracker simply hook API functions for getting hardware info or rewrite supplied ring0 driver instead of hunting zillion of crypto points.
I'll surprise you, it is not. First we do not use any APIs and second we do not use any driver for this. Driver only grants ring0 privileges to one control point at time, this control point talks directly to hardware and therefore if you want to remove each checkpoint, you have to debug it manually and that's what our technology is about. Boring and lengthy debugging, again and again.