'Unbeatable' Cinavia Anti-Piracy Technology Cracked by DVD-Ranger

'Unbeatable' Cinavia Anti-Piracy Technology Cracked by DVD-Ranger

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Starforce is the only protection scheme that to this day is largely unbreakable. It took on average, 2-3 YEARS to break some games protected with it. The newer ones are almost entirely unbreakable, if totally, and are used in military, industrial, and infrastructure protection. So successful, crackers/pirates launched a campaign to discredit it, to keep it out of games.. Hilarious if you ask me.

 

I remember some Starforce games, it caused more problems to normal consumers than to pirate users/groups. If i am remember correctly RLD group successfully fixed the protection some times, other groups followed.

God bless Steam and Valve, they really saved pc gaming.

 

Starforce was never proven to cause any PC issues at all in legitimate, owned copies of games - it's the cracked apps that caused issues. That was part of the FUD to get it taken off games they couldn't crack. A very clever guerrilla campaign to discredit it, so publishers would drop it. Starforce passed through MS Certifications with flying colors, even MS claimed SF created no more issues than any other Windows application. An independent lab found SF causing issues in only 0.003% of cases. Starforce 3 was almost impossible to fully crack. Most AAA games remain uncracked today, some were seemingly cracked after a long time. Splinter Cell took 426 days for it to be cracked, and even then it could cause stability issues in the cracked version. We clocked roughly TWO YEARS for them to break AAA titles where SF was used. (which by then it transcended the major sales windows, and we won) It was so good the bad guys developed viral campaigns to stop it from being used by publishers. The latest incarnations are entirely unbreakable, and used by military, governments, and critical infrastructure systems. The older one we used a VM type of system to bundle everything into an encrypted capsule that was constantly mutated. Later SF wraps program functions within the protection code(and VM), so they no longer "belong" to the application. The driver instead keeps a mutating table of where these constituent parts of the application are in memory, effectively shutting down reverse-engineering attempts. Thus, if the SF checks are circumvented, and the driver is not loaded, the other inline functions that were otherwise stored by the driver do not decrypt properly (if at all), resulting in program crashing, weird behavior, and the like. Without intimate knowledge of which functions are protected under the driver, it's a practical impossibility to break a SF protected application.

Personally I hated Steam because it limited copies of games to a single user in a household full of users. That's the most ridiculous, and restrictive DRM there is to me. However as my kids age, and get their own incomes, it's not as big of an issue. If I do need multiple copies I want for Steam's deep discounts, then purchase, regardless of how long that wait can be - but it's usually less than 6 months. I purchased 4 copies of BioShock Infinite at only $10.00 each a mere 5 months after release! So for that - steam has become tolerable now.