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Indie developer has a plan to keep parts of his game secret, even from data-miners
(www.gamefile.news)
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Anti viruses won't care as it won't be injecting executable code. But the whole idea won't work. To decrypt AES you need some sort of a secret key or certificate. So the game will have to have it bundled. Thus anyone with enough skill will be able to extract such key or certificate and decode resources themselves. Encryption will not provide any protection.
If the Dev were to take, for example the x,y position of the player and convert that to a key, then there would not be any bundled key. This could allow specific conditions to be met without specifying the key or solution. Truthfully though, I don't know much about AES to know if that's possible.
How do you know parts of the encrypted stuff isn't executable code? Like is he has secret levels with secret functionalities then part of whats encrypted might get executed, or interpreted and executed or something like that.
If he's going out of his way to hide and encrypt secrets, I wouldn't be surprised if parts of his gameloop are obfuscated as well. And if Anti viruses detect high levels of obfuscation, that just raises flags as probabilistic malware
Modern CPUs and operating systems have distinction between data and code in memory. Usually only privileged processes have the right to make data executable. If you load some random stuff into memory and tell your CPU to execute it as a code, you'll get nuked by OS.
It sort of looked like you'd construct the key by input. Like an old school password entry screen or something. I wonder if you could correct horse battery stapler it enough to have a respectable key length.
As I said, I bet everything will be decrypted within an hour of release.
The only way is to hold that secret key on your server until the day of content release. But that is basically a lite version of always online DRM.
Yeah, that's the only real solution.
Stuff like this isn't there to stop people with lots of resources. It's to stop people who are lazy, will see encryption and go, eh, I guess I'm not doing that after all.
It's the baseline, make it annoying enough that most people won't even bother wasting their time.
I bet you that the whole thing will be decrypted and sent to torrents during the first hour of the game's release just to teach its developer a lesson.