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Reloaded-Project / Reloaded-III

[WIP] Formal Specification for the Next Iteration of Reloaded
https://reloaded-project.github.io/Reloaded-III/
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TEMP/WIP [IDEA] DRM Detection #3

Open Sewer56 opened 1 year ago

Sewer56 commented 1 year ago

Detect common forms of DRM; and warn the user about them; here are some examples.

SafeDisc & SecuROM

These old DRM render games unplayable on modern hardware, due to requiring unsafe kernel drivers that are blacklisted on Windows.

End user might need to find no-CD crack.

Steam Stub

Embedded Steam DRM (.bind section) is supposed to protect game code from being reverse engineered prior to release of a Steam game. If a game ships this DRM post shipping, it serves no purpose. End users should suggest the developers to not use this DRM.

This DRM can also be removed with Steamless.

Denuvo, Arxan, VMProtect & Other Virtual Machine based Products

Unremovable. Most publishers never strip it from their titles (even after years post release); which will render games completely unplayable one day in the future.

As this renders the products defective by design, end users should ideally boycott publishers which don't eventually remove this form of copy protection from their titles.

Microsoft

This neat DRM baked into the OS that you get with Store/GamePass prevents the following:

RibShark commented 1 year ago

Small correction: SecuROM runs entirely in user mode and works fine on modern Windows (aside from a few cases where another layer of DRM such as JoWooD Xprot was also used).

xiaoxiao921 commented 1 year ago

Another awful one: StarForce literally break windows 10 / 11 from booting (I think when I tried it months ago it install a .sys kernel driver that straight up make windows crash on boot), was used on a Trackmania game (can't remember the exact one). People do talk about it on the wikipedia page under Copy Protection System and also that stackoverflow thread

Sewer56 commented 1 year ago

was used on a Trackmania game (can't remember the exact one)

I think that would be the original TrackMania Nations (ESWC), the predecessor to Nations Forever

Sewer56 commented 1 year ago

Misc note: A very easy way to detect presence of Denuvo in a game/version agnostic way is just to sigscan for support.codefusion.technology string in the binary. Which is their endpoint for offline activations.