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.
ASLR (for example) is a pretty standard technique, I thought all commercial OSes enabled this generally. What's the purpose of picking at this portion?
the threat is people who cheat in games. obfuscation slows them down, but does not offer complete protection and incurs a performance cost. this work is focused on reducing the performance cost.
Exactly. That and in game currencies. You like competing in games, or for game-bucks? Well you need some level of obfuscation and hardening to make that viable.
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-brok...
...making it even more clear what "secure" boot actually secures: the control others have over your own computer.
Which provides way more information than the article
I don't think any competent security researcher has anything positive to say about "security through obscurity"
at best this is lawyer position
Obscurity is totally underrated. Attacker resources are limited.
Some people find cracking them interesting and fun.
- from the slides
So, money, for supposed control. Which is not true of course