Company promises countermeasures against new DRM bypasses — zero-day game releases become norm as security concerns mount over hypervisor-based bypass
Good luck
Using the hypervisor bypass, even in its latest incarnation, requires users to disable:
- Virtualization-Based Security (VBS): a layer that separates the Windows operating system from the its security enforcement features that run at a higher privilege level.
- Credential Guard: a sub-feature of VBS that keeps login credentials in an container isolated from the rest of the operating system.
- Driver Signature Enforcement: verification that any drivers installed in the system must have a digital signature issued by Microsoft to an identifiable company or developer, in order to prevent installing random drivers at the system level.
- Core Isolation / Memory Integrity (HVCI): similar to the above, but prevents any kernel-level unsigned code entirely, as well as modifications to existing signed code so programs can’t attempt to mess with existing drivers.
- Installing a community-made hypervisor (HV) with Windows running on top of it. This HV fakes responses to the checks that Denuvo makes, and runs with higher permissions (ring level -1) than the operating system itself and has full, nearly untraceable access to hardware and software.
First 4 are disabled on unsupported systems anyway (4 is also sometimes disabled to squeeze out gaming performance), but 5 is scary as hell.
Windows forcing users to have to pay extra for what should be default security features has always been an awful practice.
The only one of those that is locked behind a specific Windows edition is Credential Guard, which only works on Enterprise and Education because it has to do with auth tokens of the domain, not local windows login AFAIK
The rest are locked behind hardware features like TPM and UEFI settings like secure boot.
I hate Microslop as much as the next person, but they do actually try to push their security features on everyone because of the reputation they’ve had as the most insecure OS.
If Microsoft were honest they’d change the name from Windows to Backdoors.
No backdoors here!
But the windows are all wide open and on the ground floor.
Windows home edition does not even fully support bitlocker. You can’t say they are seriously trying to push security when they don’t even offer their full disk encryption capabilities to their home users.
If the Russian Mafia can do it, theoretically so can you.
DRM, game launchers and generally 3/4 of modern software overall are a security threat anyway.
That said, the best solution for all this problems is to never buy, pirate or play any DRMed crap. Let them choke on their greedy tech.
The safest computer is one that stays in the box. But that is not what computers are for.
I can’t help but wonder, shouldn’t this all be possible on Linux without needing to install a hacked hypervisor? At most you would need a kernel patch, but since Denuvo operates through Wine, maybe an entirely userland solution would be possible too.
WTH I’ve known HSMs easier to bypass. Just to prevent people from playing a game, it’s ridiculous.
There will inevitably be some YouTube video that explains how to do all of this, and it will be followed without question by thousands of 12 year olds who don’t understand the security implications. They just want to play the new shiny game, and their parents told them they’d only buy the game if they got all A’s on their report card. So now their computer is orders of magnitude less secure (and likely running some mining/botnet in the background) because they wanted the game for free. This is just going to be the current generation’s version of “accidentally nuked the family computer with LimeWire downloads.”
My gaming PC has no personally-identifiable information whatsoever and can be purged freely at a moment’s notice.
Checkmate.
Never tried, but what about nested vm’s ? It should be possible to have a normal secure vm, with a ‘compromised’ hp/vm running microslop running. In theory I guess…
It’s gonna be really funny if the meta becomes Windows users booting into Linux just to boot a Single-GPU passthru Windows VM to play triple A’s without getting pwned lol
Thanks for reminding me about why I have been exclusively playing older games or games from my backlog. Seriously with the prices of video games it’s not worth it to buy them anymore let alone have the hardware to even play them. PC gaming sounds like a nightmare where you have to do all this crazy nonsense just to play some games at slightly better performance or if you are poor like me. I have long since stopped at pirating normal PC games though personally and have been pirating ROMs instead for emulators or buying from GOG. Much easier and you have like 4 decades worth of content just to play through. I say just let the modern gaming industry rot and toil. Play some Indie games instead like Deltarune or Silksong or I am your beast. Do anything but not support this dumb market of triple A games where they cost almost a hundred dollars now and require super computers hooked up to your actual computer to run.
100% this. If you find a nice, trusted source, you’ll play some really hard to get games.
But one mistake and your shit isn’t yours anymore.
If someone just has System for gaming only, is there really a risk? Shunning they only sign into game clients.
I you are considering the random hypervisor as a potential threat (which you should):
- your auth tokens for things like Steam could be stolen, and possibly be used to make purchases with linked cards, or empty your inventory of things like CS skins, gift copies of games, etc.
- if not fully isolated, it could be an attack vector to other machines on your LAN
- peripherals like mic, camera, keyboard could be accessed to spy on you
- and more…
Sounds like they painted themselves into a DRM corner. More like a ledge. Now the only option is to jump.
Can these be run on Linux?
No, I understand the bypass does not work on Linux.
Just curious, does the crack work on Linux? Presumably you wouldn’t have to do the same things, assuming it works at all.
the sad part is most of these aaa slop games aren’t worth the time or risk
Exactly. Don’t know when I last got a new game… I think it was that Hogwarts game
hard hitting journalist Thomas Shardware
It doesn’t work on linux from what I’ve heard so… Meh, unfortunately.
