Other country, other views

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Last week, I reported that Nintendo succeeded to sue an Australian retailer of R4.

Unfortunately, for Nintendo, it is not always as straight forward for other countries. Recently, Nintendo experienced a reversal in France. In 2009, Nintendo prosecuted six French retailers among which Assentek. On 3rd December 2009, the Parisian Tribunal de Grande Instance (TGI) nonsuited Nintendo. Thus, this sets a legal precedent making legal the sales of linkers, such as R4.

On 9th December, both Nintendo and the state prosecutor appealed against this decision. Thus, we will have to wait for the final decision.

Assentek provides an interesting press review.

It is always surprising that two countries do not perceive piracy in the same way. One of the difficulties is that there is no harmonization of copyright and trademark laws.

DPA contest V2

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Since the seminal work of Paul KOCHER (founder of CRI), side channel attacks have challenged many cryptographers and implementers. In a nutshell, side channel attacks use side information to guess secret keys. A simplified explanation: let’s imagine that your AES implementation takes longer when processing a “1” of the secret key than a “0”, by measuring the processing time you may guess the secret keys (without any intrusion). This is called a timing attack. There are other available side channel pieces of information such as power, electro-magnetic … Side channel attacks are devastating.

There is no standard way to compare the efficiency of different side channel attacks. Under the initiative of Telecom Paris Tech, the DPA contest expects to benchmark these attacks.

The second edition, DPA contest V2, allows different teams to compare their respective Differential Power Analysis attacks (DPA) against an unprotected AES implementation. Results will be presented in one coming crypto conference.

Nintendo fights R4 piracy

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There are many ways to fight piracy: Technical means where you try to design your system to be “unbreakable” or you update it to render current circumventing solutions inefficient. Or you may use the legal means where you sue the pirate.

In its fight against R4, Nintendo uses both methods. R4 cards (and R4i) are among the most popular cards for pirating Nintendo DS (and Nintendo DSi). This card is inserted in the cartridge in place of the legit game. You may download the games (so called ROMs) from the Internet, store them in a standard flash memory, and here you play. In other words, you can find on the Internet, about all (if not all :Sad: ) the published games and run them for free on your DS with the R4. The price of these cards being ridiculous, you may guess the huge success. I must confess, that at least in France, R4 is rather successful.

Nintendo has attempted (and is currently attempting) several ways to thwart R4. Unfortunately, not with great success.
But they are successfully on the legal battlefield. In February, Nintendo got GadgetGear, an Australian company, to pay A$620,000 (about 414K€ or 567K$) by way of damages. Since 2008, Nintendo pursued more than 800 actions against resellers. Fighting local resellers is a good strategy if this generates good frightening examples. With the easiness, to find local resellers on the Internet, it seems that Nintendo needs more successful trials to scare the resellers. Resellers are rather operating openly.

For more details, see the press release.

Game security is really a tough job.

UBISOFT re-torpedoed

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The use of a new type of DRM for its new games “Silent Hunter 5” and “Assassin Creed II” raised a violent reaction against Ubisoft. The software was cracked in less than 24 hours.

But this time, the story did not stop there. Last week, Ubisoft was under a serious Denial Of Service (DOS) attack. Thus, the legitimate gamers were not able to play! These games require online connection for initial authentication but also to save the game! It seems that this weekend a new salvo of DOS was launched from Russia against Ubisoft’s servers. These DOS attacks make the hacked version more attractive (that’s the limit!  :Sad: )

Furthermore, some players confirmed on forums that the hacked game was complete (which initially Ubisoft denied).

Lesson: When designing a DRM, we should check what occurs if some context environments fail (such as network connection. The impact should be minimal for the legit customer.

Twitter’s selection of bad password

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When signing up to Twitter and selecting your password, Twitter bans some passwords although they have the minimal size. These passwords are hard coded in the code, and thus can be consulted (which is not an issue at all).

If you don’t want to reverse engineer code, the full list of 370 bad passwords is published by the Wundercounter.

It is interesting to see them. They are totally logic. Interestingly, this password ban is only for English native speakers. Foreigners can still use stupid passwords. For instance, as expected QWERTY, but also ASDFGH are banned. In france, among the worst passwords, we have AZERTY and QSDFGH due to our specific keyboards.

It is really fun to see the selection. My preferred one is THX1178. How many geeks would use this one? It is an ultimate recognition to be listed with STARWARS and STARTREK.

In any case, it is a good initiative. But internationalisation would be better. Do you know any repository of bad passwords for many languages?

Ubisoft’s DRM torpedoed!

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Ubisoft recently launched its new game “Silent Hunter 5”, a simulation of submarine. The game was protected with a new generation of DRM that required constant online connection to servers. Of course, if you are online, it is easier to fight piracy. As usually, in the game arena, this new DRM generated a huge fury (remember Spore).

Unfortunately, 24 hours after the launch, a cracked version appeared on the P2P networks (see TorrentFreak). The cracked version does not require online connection!

Quickly, Ubisoft denied that the game was cracked.

“You have probably seen rumors on the web that Assassin’s Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 have been cracked. Please know that this rumor is false and while a pirated version may seem to be complete at start up, any gamer who downloads and plays a cracked version will find that their version is not complete,”

Unfortunately, when scouting the forums, I never find any person complaining that the game was not working. Nevertheless, the crack requires to avoid any connection to Ubisoft servers.

Ubisoft was expecting to deploy the same DRM for Assassin Creed II. Some delay may be foreseen.

As a citizen, I see the need of DRM. As a security expert, I “build” DRM. Piracy is bad. As a gamer, I hate DRM that requires a permanent connection for a game that does not need interaction with other entities. I often play games in train or plane. Such a DRM requirement would be deterrent for me. One of the most important requirements for DRM is that DRM should be as transparent as possible for honest user.

Software protection is one of the most complex tasks.

ReFormat: Automatic Reverse Engineering of Encrypted Messages

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Five researchers, Z. WANG, X. JANG, W. CUI, W. WANG and M. GRACE presented, according to me, a nice piece of work at Esorics 2009.

The objective was to automatically reverse engineer encrypted messages without breaking the algorithms. The basic idea is simple. When a piece of software receives an encrypted message, it performs two steps (regardless of the used cryptographic algorithms and protocols). First, it decrypts the message and then it processes the clear message. This means that the message is during a while in the clear in the memory. if you identify the location of this buffer, and when it is used, then game over.

To succeeed, they used two tricks. The first was to distinguish between decryption routines and normal processing routines. Cryptographic functions use far more bit wise and arithmetic operations than normal software. They measured (on OpenSSL) that more than 80% of the operations were bit wise and arithmetic for cryptographic functions. The rate dropped beneath 25% for normal processing. This heuristic allows to detect the encryption/decryption phases.

The second step is to locate the buffer containing the clear text. They identify all the buffers that are written while in decryption phase. Then, they identify all the buffers that are read during the processing phase. The expected buffer should be in the intersection between the two sets.

Obviously, there are many ways to deter this attack. For instance code obfuscation may change the rate. Dynamic code encryption is of course a must. Nevertheless, I found the approach extremely clever.

Once more, it proves that writing secure implementations is extremely difficult. And it requires clearly a twisted mindset. :Happy:

If you are interested in tamper resistance, you have to read this paper. It is available here.