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Encryption Chip Will End Piracy, Says Atari Founder
by Aaron Linde, May 23, 2008 1:57pm PDTAt yesterday's Wedbush Morgan Securities conference, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell claimed that a stealth encryption chip will "absolutely stop piracy of [PC] gameplay."
"There is a stealth encryption chip called a TPM that is going on the motherboards of most of the computers that are coming out now," explained Bushnell, according to a GamesIndustry report.
"What that says is that in the games business we will be able to encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world--which is uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords--which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem."
Piracy has been a hot-button issue in the PC gaming industry for some time now, with renowned PC developers such as Crytek, id, and Epic claiming that the high rate of pirated PC software forced them to put games on other platforms.
"I've seen studios close as the result of it, I've seen people lose their homes," former Ritual QA manager Mike Russell told Shacknews while discussing the effects of piracy. "I guess I'm more vocal than a lot of people because I've seen the personal side of it, and it's just sad that we have so many people looking for a way of justifying it."
Bushnell suggested that though movie and music piracy will likely continue unabated, game markets made previously inaccessible due to piracy issues will begin to flourish as the chip's install base grows.
"Games are a different thing, because games are so integrated with the code. The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay," he noted. "As soon as the installed base of the TPM hardware chip gets large enough, we will start to see revenues coming from Asia and India at a time when before it didn't make sense."
After founding Atari and making Pong a household name, Bushnell went on to create the Chuck E. Cheese franchise, which mixed pizza eateries with arcades and animatronic stage performances.
Since then, he has moved away from the mainstream video game industry, and recently went so far as to label modern games "pure, unadulterated trash."
Comments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Bushnell
That Nolan Bushnell? What a nice track record there; surely he's believable. :-P
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- decompress to windows directory
- run included registry hack
- make sure image is mounted
- play pirate proof games
Thus you can't say, grab the decrypted executable data as you can't access the memory access APIs to read it back to copy.
Linux would still be Linux. The kernel would presumably ignore the chip (i.e., the kernel might just say "hi" and that's about it) and software running above that level wouldn't be encrypted/signed anyways.
Probably makes it easier for the Government to see what we are doing.
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Anything put in the pathway can be bypassed.
Anything that a PC can read, can be stored
Anything digital can be changed.
^^^^ the above are all a question of not how, but when.
Piracy is rampant, and will continue to be so. The only people this effects is the poor end user that has to dance through hoops just to get at what he legitimately purchased.
Personally, if a game doesn't have either a beta or a demo. I'm not touching it. The marketing departments at game companies are no better than mortgage companies or used car salesmen. NEVER take them at their word. Try before you buy.
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To play the game you had to go to a bunch of pages in the manual and look up the codes requested.
We owned the game, then lost the manual...
Justice!
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The only way to make your game uncrackable is to not release it...and even then you have to trust your employees.
The first and most visible result of this technology will be to make machines without TPM chips obsolete.
The second result will be after TPM is cracked and machines without TPM2 will be obsolete.
Those people not buying your games will still 'not buy' your games. Those people who buy your games will no longer be able to play your games, and therefore...won't buy them.
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*NOBODY* has cracked the Xbox nor the Xbox 360's encryption scheme yet. The flaw in the xbox's implementation is that each game, when released, will operate on "any" xbox that it is played on. Thus, if you can dump the xbox game itself, you can simply have it run on any xbox that it pleases. The xbox 360 will not run unsigned code, which prevents homebrew from loading.
The TPM would go one step further than this. What would happen is this:
BIOS on motherboard is signed. TPM allows it to load. BIOS, which is trusted, then allows OS to load. OS loads, which now trusts drivers. OS also trusts the software. The software would be locked and signed to operate only on the TPM chip that it was downloaded for, *your* public key. Which would then only be decrypted and executed by the private key located within your TPM.
If you don't understand basic PKI, you won't understand how this works. Encryption and PKI is a very good way at ensuring communications occurs only between devices that it needs to occur to. After all, we use it to protect virtually everything these days that needs to be protected. SSL works this way, which you use while you handle your online bank account.
Essentially, even if you stripped this "signature" from the code and distributed the game, you would have to have the software be resigned to every machine that it loaded on (remember, your TPM and OS won't allow your computer to run unsigned software).
It's very effective to say the least. Particularly if the system itself offers a 2 way validation. As we stay more and more connected, that will be here in due time.
BIOS is signed, loads OS. OS checks to make sure BIOS was signed and it's loading into a proper environment. Move down the chain and it does the same thing continuously on and on.
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SecuROM makes it a little harder to run a kernel debugger, and suddenly the new version is unbreakable. Except the debugger prevention is easily circumventable at the kernel level and their new uncrackable protection is cracked within a day of release. And yet publishers are still stupid enough to believe that SecuROM 7/8/9/whatever is going to protect their game because Sony says so.
Real native binary encryption at the CPU level is the only thing that's ever going to be technically effective enough to stop a binary dump, and that's not what this is.
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It still will be pirated, but i bet the number of users using a pirate copy will be lower.
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TPM stealth encryption chip cracked by hackers
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After all, people already go so far as to utilize invasive hardware techniques to circumvent copy protection on consoles -- it's certainly not a stretch to suggest that PC pirates would embrace this approach as well.
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rofl.. i hated those fuckin things..
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I bet with in 3 month's this will be bypassed or just out right cracked making it worthless.
Hell iv seen people steal a bike since it was locked and leave the unlocked one alone just to see if they could do it and get away with it befor any one stops them and its the same with PC game's.
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Anyway, I can see publishers being optimistic about the additional level of (even temporary) piracy prevention; the only problem I see is ensuring 100% compatiblity between software and hardware. - we have problems now with copy protection and optical drives.
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Don't waste your time and money because you're going to kill yourselves once this is cracked 48 hours after your first release comes out.
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the only time i don't do this is if it's going to remove value from my system, custom firmware only adds value to a psp, but i don't hack my xbox because i find value in Live, which i don't know i would be able to continue to use
for me, something like Live or Steam is way more effective at getting me to stay legit with software or hardware than any chip or encryption someone puts in the system
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