There has been a lot of activity lately in the copy protection market. Most recently, UbiSoft have started to protect their games with Tagés. Their latest titles released in America; XIII and Beyond, Good & Evil are both protected, with further titles pending early this month.
The search for the best solution continues. Sometimes you have to wonder how much companies really know about what they're
purchasing. It would be hard to see the weak points if you don't know how to
target them. So, I decided to contact UbiSoft, Electronic Arts and CodeMasters
for their comments about what they aim to achieve and the type of pirating they
are trying to stop. Unfortunately, no one was available to comment as of yet.
🙂
This time last year, to have a game protected with StarForce in Europe was a rare thing. But it's becoming all too common for the odd game here and there to be protected. Over the last year, StarForce sales have moved from predominantly being an Asia/Russian market, to the west. Titles such as Curse: The Eye of Isis, Pax Romana, Emergency Fire Response, World War II, Wild Life, Cycling Manager, Restaurant Empire, Horse Racing Manager, War and Peace and many more have appeared.
What do these protections offer?
TAGé‰S
What makes Tagés stand out from any other protection on the market is that they:
"Guarantee full immunity with 1:1 copy" this is achieved because, Our main technical asset is our specific mastering process which builds up a programmable "secure area" on disc and makes one-to-one copies a thing of the past.
Indeed, quite a technical asset to have, modification of the CD is performed in order to produce strange seeking patterns that can hide sectors. Although, they may wish to think twice about their guarantee, since it is possible with certain writers and custom written software. Which, no doubt we will see appear if the protection proves to become popular.
As for the other side of the protection, it's heavily customer focused. Sets of checking libraries are provided to the customer so they themselves must implement their own checks and use their imaginations. Not ideal for everyone, but a company with a good coder on hand could easily produce a very strong system.
StarForce
StarForce claim their protection superior to rivals due
to the lack of needing a digital signature and base protection on a point to point timing check of the physical sectors, which corresponds to a key. Starforce 1 and 2 were defeated using DPM technology. Data Position Measurement technology allows timing of sectors reads to be read and stored, such as the MDS format, Media Description. Various tools exist to then emulate these timings and even in the background with a burnt cd. Starforce 3 later implemented is own direct IDE driver access to bypass any virtual drivers, which has proven successful due to the amount of work required to reprogram virtual drive software.
A wizard is provided for the customer to select and wrap thier functions. The game data and executables are protected by the most advanced, anti debug/reversing methods ever seen, Starforce set a milestone in the protection market in my own view, but as always there are already promising things being found to defeat aspects of this protection.
* Neither company was available to comment on future development of their products.
So that's the end of another year, anti-copying protections advance as does the copying software, where will it all lead us? Well, lets see what becomes of next year. 🙂
Source: CD Freaks Exclusive
