4 ms·

This is decidedly not what I’d expect to be discussed at Thotcon. That said, super interesting! As an avid pirate, I’ll say these days even the Denuvo game whi

by wincy 6mo ago

This is decidedly not what I’d expect to be discussed at Thotcon. That said, super interesting! As an avid pirate, I’ll say these days even the Denuvo game which were going years without cracks now have “cracks”, although they rely on hypervisor fixes and disabling secure boot and giving the hypervisor cracks unfettered access to your system to intercept the Denuvo checks. [0] It’s a dangerous game we’re playing to keep these AAA games bottom lines fat. [0] https://www.thefpsreview.com/2026/04/03/denuvo-has-been-broken-hypervisor-bypasses-enable-day-zero-cracks-irdeto-promises-a-fix/ https://www.thefpsreview.com/2026/04/03/denuvo-has-been-brok...

userbinator 6mo ago
disabling secure boot ...making it even more clear what "secure" boot actually secures: the control others have over your own computer.
- 7bit 6mo ago
  Cheap take
- chii 6mo ago
  It has their uses. If, for example, a company wants to issue fleet computers to workers or school to students, you want to have secure boot on those devices to prevent tampering. Secure boot makes it so that physical access is not the end all of security. If you own the computer yourself, you "ought" to be able to turn off these measures in a way that is undetectable. Being unable to do so would be the red line imho - and looking at those hypervisor cracks available, it's not quite being crossed. The pessimistic, but realistic future prediction is that various media companies would want and lobby for machines to have unbreakable enclaves for which they can "trust" to DRM your machine, and it's just boiling the frog right now. Windows 11's new TPM requirement is testament to that. Switch to linux asap - that's about the only thing a consumer is capable of doing.
  - bitwize 6mo ago
    This is coming. In particular, without a Secure-Boot-enforced allowlist of operating systems, it will be near impossible to verify that an OS connecting to the internet complies with your locality's age verification laws, so it will soon be illegal to run a computer that does not make Secure Boot mandatory and connect it to the network. If you're starting to think "huh, maybe that's why these age verification laws suddenly became all the rage", you're onto something. Whatever the case, "general purpose computing" is definitely cooked.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - charcircuit 6mo ago
      General purpose computing as it was done in the 1900s is cooked for the average user because there is no market incentive for it to exist. The actual market incentive revolves around apps as they provide user value along with the ability to deploy custom apps.
    - ndriscoll 6mo ago
      The laws in my locality place requirements on the service provider (e.g. the adult website operator), not on random computer owners or manufacturers or software vendors.
      - josephcsible 6mo ago
        Newsom signed a law that places those requirements on every operating system in California, and in practice, organizations tend to comply with California's terrible laws no matter where you are, rather than stopping doing business there or making two variants of their products.
        ndriscoll 6mo ago
        With software it's trivial to have a switch for "California compliant" mode, but in any case, that makes it clear that such criticisms should be directed at California. Other (generally "red") states already had a more reasonable solution: make the sites offering the restricted service liable for their actions just like other businesses.
- dwattttt 6mo ago
  It would work just as well if the instructions instead told you to enrol your own key and sign the cracks. Those instructions just aren't as popular.
- saidnooneever 6mo ago
  it is stupid to turn it off. It is incredibly easy to infect your system components without your knowning. that being said, it does assume a certain trust in firmware vendors / oems. If you dont trust those, then dont buy from them. i think for most ppl trusting OEM or trusting rando from interwebz with a custom hypervisor and requirement to cripple my system security are totally different things .. u know they could actually make theyr HV support secure boot etc. to do it properly and have ur system run the cracks but not have gaping holes left by them -_-. lazy.
  - maccard 6mo ago
    If you’re downloading torrents and running code with elevated privileges that infects your PC, 99% of people are absolutely hosed at that point anyway. I don’t see th real distinction between being owned at an elevated system level and owned by disabling system secure boot for a home user
    - butlike 6mo ago
      pwned at the bios level means the pwnage can survive a complete OS reinstall
  - bandrami 6mo ago
    As always in security, It Depends™; there are vulnerabilities that only impact systems with secure boot (and result in a situation worse than not having secure boot to begin with).
    - walletdrainer 6mo ago
      > there are vulnerabilities that only impact systems with secure boot Boring claim, obviously true. > and result in a situation worse than not having secure boot to begin with A very big claim that requires evidence.
      - Geof25 6mo ago
        If your system gets locked (I.e. ransomware) and you have secure boot active, then you are out of luck. See Apple M chips which if they get locked you will never unlock them again.
- charcircuit 6mo ago
  Having an operating system purposefully allow support to installing rootkits should clearly be a bad idea. It shouldn't be surprising you have to turn off security features to install a rootkit.
  - josephcsible 6mo ago
    Anti-cheat drivers are just as much of rootkits, and in practice, they have vulnerabilities that get a lot more hosts pwned than cheats do. Let's get Microsoft to stop loading their drivers.
    - charcircuit 6mo ago
      I agree. Microsoft should provide proper integrity APIs to apps so they don't need such drivers. The fact that the PC ecosystem is so far behind XBox's for platform integrity is a big failure on Microsoft's part towards the PC gaming market.
      - josephcsible 6mo ago
        The "integrity" you speak of is a bad thing. Microsoft should be making that harder to obtain, not easier.
        charcircuit 6mo ago
        Integrity is needed for a fair playing field. Their is consumer demand for such a fair playing field so it is a good thing for an operating system to respond to customer demand.
tossit444 6mo ago
The main site to get these hypervisor cracks thoroughly vets them, requiring the devs to publish the source code to it all.
sneusse 6mo ago
What I'm wondering for a while now: How do the game streaming services run the Denuvo titles? Do they get special builds? They will not run on bare metal hardware but in some kind of VM right? Wouldn't Denuvo detect that and stop working?
- meinersbur 6mo ago
  They get their own build. E.g. * GeForce NOW SDK: https://developer.geforcenow.com/learn/guides/offerings-sdk https://developer.geforcenow.com/learn/guides/offerings-sdk * Stadia SDK: developer.stadia.com (offline) * Xbox Cloud Gaming: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/docs/features/common/game-streaming/game-streaming-overview?view=gdk-2510 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/docs/features/c... * ... Just like every Game Store requires its own build: Steamworks SDK, even GOG: https://docs.gog.com/sdk/ https://docs.gog.com/sdk/ Some games allow browsing files locally for savegames, music libray, ... . Imagine if you could do that on the cloud VM.
  - sneusse 6mo ago
    That makes a lot of sense, thanks for clarifying!
  - wincy 6mo ago
    To add to this, almost every time a Denuvo game was “cracked” before the hypervisor methods it was because the dev accidentally published a demo with none of the Denuvo stuff. Happened to Lies of P a couple months after release.
  - RunningDroid 6mo ago
    > * Stadia SDK: developer.stadia.com (offline) Stadia is completely shutdown and Archive.org has no captures of that subdomain so any content there is likely lost.
seany 6mo ago
Secure boot is the first thing that gets disabled on any machine of mine. Why is this a bad thing?
- r0yadar 6mo ago
  Essentially secure boot is supposed to validate that only properly signed drivers are loaded on system startup. That allows you to block malicious/cheat drivers from being loaded because a signed AV/anticheat driver was loaded before and now it can properly control drivers that are being loaded after it. Without it you are risking that the malicious driver will be loaded first and then make itself invisible to the later drivers. Of course there are ways to bypass this too, but it adds a whole other layer of complexity. Tldr Secure boot is there so drivers loaded at boot time can trust that nothing was tampered with before they were loaded.

by wincy 6mo ago

userbinator 6mo ago

disabling secure boot ...making it even more clear what "secure" boot actually secures: the control others have over your own computer.

7bit 6mo ago
Cheap take
chii 6mo ago
It has their uses. If, for example, a company wants to issue fleet computers to workers or school to students, you want to have secure boot on those devices to prevent tampering. Secure boot makes it so that physical access is not the end all of security. If you own the computer yourself, you "ought" to be able to turn off these measures in a way that is undetectable. Being unable to do so would be the red line imho - and looking at those hypervisor cracks available, it's not quite being crossed. The pessimistic, but realistic future prediction is that various media companies would want and lobby for machines to have unbreakable enclaves for which they can "trust" to DRM your machine, and it's just boiling the frog right now. Windows 11's new TPM requirement is testament to that. Switch to linux asap - that's about the only thing a consumer is capable of doing.
- bitwize 6mo ago
  This is coming. In particular, without a Secure-Boot-enforced allowlist of operating systems, it will be near impossible to verify that an OS connecting to the internet complies with your locality's age verification laws, so it will soon be illegal to run a computer that does not make Secure Boot mandatory and connect it to the network. If you're starting to think "huh, maybe that's why these age verification laws suddenly became all the rage", you're onto something. Whatever the case, "general purpose computing" is definitely cooked.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - charcircuit 6mo ago
    General purpose computing as it was done in the 1900s is cooked for the average user because there is no market incentive for it to exist. The actual market incentive revolves around apps as they provide user value along with the ability to deploy custom apps.
  - ndriscoll 6mo ago
    The laws in my locality place requirements on the service provider (e.g. the adult website operator), not on random computer owners or manufacturers or software vendors.
    - josephcsible 6mo ago
      Newsom signed a law that places those requirements on every operating system in California, and in practice, organizations tend to comply with California's terrible laws no matter where you are, rather than stopping doing business there or making two variants of their products.
      - ndriscoll 6mo ago
        With software it's trivial to have a switch for "California compliant" mode, but in any case, that makes it clear that such criticisms should be directed at California. Other (generally "red") states already had a more reasonable solution: make the sites offering the restricted service liable for their actions just like other businesses.
dwattttt 6mo ago
It would work just as well if the instructions instead told you to enrol your own key and sign the cracks. Those instructions just aren't as popular.
saidnooneever 6mo ago
it is stupid to turn it off. It is incredibly easy to infect your system components without your knowning. that being said, it does assume a certain trust in firmware vendors / oems. If you dont trust those, then dont buy from them. i think for most ppl trusting OEM or trusting rando from interwebz with a custom hypervisor and requirement to cripple my system security are totally different things .. u know they could actually make theyr HV support secure boot etc. to do it properly and have ur system run the cracks but not have gaping holes left by them -_-. lazy.
- maccard 6mo ago
  If you’re downloading torrents and running code with elevated privileges that infects your PC, 99% of people are absolutely hosed at that point anyway. I don’t see th real distinction between being owned at an elevated system level and owned by disabling system secure boot for a home user
  - butlike 6mo ago
    pwned at the bios level means the pwnage can survive a complete OS reinstall
- bandrami 6mo ago
  As always in security, It Depends™; there are vulnerabilities that only impact systems with secure boot (and result in a situation worse than not having secure boot to begin with).
  - walletdrainer 6mo ago
    > there are vulnerabilities that only impact systems with secure boot Boring claim, obviously true. > and result in a situation worse than not having secure boot to begin with A very big claim that requires evidence.
    - Geof25 6mo ago
      If your system gets locked (I.e. ransomware) and you have secure boot active, then you are out of luck. See Apple M chips which if they get locked you will never unlock them again.
charcircuit 6mo ago
Having an operating system purposefully allow support to installing rootkits should clearly be a bad idea. It shouldn't be surprising you have to turn off security features to install a rootkit.
- josephcsible 6mo ago
  Anti-cheat drivers are just as much of rootkits, and in practice, they have vulnerabilities that get a lot more hosts pwned than cheats do. Let's get Microsoft to stop loading their drivers.
  - charcircuit 6mo ago
    I agree. Microsoft should provide proper integrity APIs to apps so they don't need such drivers. The fact that the PC ecosystem is so far behind XBox's for platform integrity is a big failure on Microsoft's part towards the PC gaming market.
    - josephcsible 6mo ago
      The "integrity" you speak of is a bad thing. Microsoft should be making that harder to obtain, not easier.
      - charcircuit 6mo ago
        Integrity is needed for a fair playing field. Their is consumer demand for such a fair playing field so it is a good thing for an operating system to respond to customer demand.

tossit444 6mo ago

The main site to get these hypervisor cracks thoroughly vets them, requiring the devs to publish the source code to it all.

sneusse 6mo ago

What I'm wondering for a while now: How do the game streaming services run the Denuvo titles? Do they get special builds? They will not run on bare metal hardware but in some kind of VM right? Wouldn't Denuvo detect that and stop working?

meinersbur 6mo ago
They get their own build. E.g. * GeForce NOW SDK: https://developer.geforcenow.com/learn/guides/offerings-sdk https://developer.geforcenow.com/learn/guides/offerings-sdk * Stadia SDK: developer.stadia.com (offline) * Xbox Cloud Gaming: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/docs/features/common/game-streaming/game-streaming-overview?view=gdk-2510 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/docs/features/c... * ... Just like every Game Store requires its own build: Steamworks SDK, even GOG: https://docs.gog.com/sdk/ https://docs.gog.com/sdk/ Some games allow browsing files locally for savegames, music libray, ... . Imagine if you could do that on the cloud VM.
- sneusse 6mo ago
  That makes a lot of sense, thanks for clarifying!
- wincy 6mo ago
  To add to this, almost every time a Denuvo game was “cracked” before the hypervisor methods it was because the dev accidentally published a demo with none of the Denuvo stuff. Happened to Lies of P a couple months after release.
- RunningDroid 6mo ago
  > * Stadia SDK: developer.stadia.com (offline) Stadia is completely shutdown and Archive.org has no captures of that subdomain so any content there is likely lost.

seany 6mo ago

Secure boot is the first thing that gets disabled on any machine of mine. Why is this a bad thing?

r0yadar 6mo ago
Essentially secure boot is supposed to validate that only properly signed drivers are loaded on system startup. That allows you to block malicious/cheat drivers from being loaded because a signed AV/anticheat driver was loaded before and now it can properly control drivers that are being loaded after it. Without it you are risking that the malicious driver will be loaded first and then make itself invisible to the later drivers. Of course there are ways to bypass this too, but it adds a whole other layer of complexity. Tldr Secure boot is there so drivers loaded at boot time can trust that nothing was tampered with before they were loaded.