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Would piracy for the Switch...

Kill it's potential 59 28.92%
 
Help with sales 113 55.39%
 
Other 32 15.69%
 
Total:204
Zkuq on 07 March 2017
vivster said:
Mnementh said:

 As a programmer I can assure you that is impossible. You can make it difficult though and you can void the guarantee.

Couldn't they invent their own hardware and software architecture that is literally unreadable for common computer hard- and software? They wouldn't even have to encrypt it since the system itself is cryptic. I mean it's proprietary hardware, they can do whatever they want :)

It would require having fully custom hardware and software for reading and writing data as well, which would probably be much more of a pain for Nintendo than having, say, a custom CPU architecture. It's just not practical, and more importantly, security through obscurity is considered a bad practice. Someone's going to figure it out sooner or later anyway.



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Mnementh on 07 March 2017
vivster said:
Mnementh said:

 As a programmer I can assure you that is impossible. You can make it difficult though and you can void the guarantee.

Couldn't they invent their own hardware and software architecture that is literally unreadable for common computer hard- and software? They wouldn't even have to encrypt it since the system itself is cryptic. I mean it's proprietary hardware, they can do whatever they want :)

And nobody can program for it? If you can program for it, you have a guide which bytecode means what and can work with that.



3DS-FC: 4511-1768-7903 (Mii-Name: Mnementh), Nintendo-Network-ID: Mnementh, Switch: SW-7706-3819-9381 (Mnementh)

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Zkuq on 07 March 2017
Mnementh said:
vivster said:

Couldn't they invent their own hardware and software architecture that is literally unreadable for common computer hard- and software? They wouldn't even have to encrypt it since the system itself is cryptic. I mean it's proprietary hardware, they can do whatever they want :)

And nobody can program for it? If you can program for it, you have a guide which bytecode means what and can work with that.

Technically Nintendo could just offer a compiler and not explain how the hardware works. If assembly-level optimizations are common in the game industry, this solution would obviously kill all such optimizations until someone reverse-engineered the system.



Barkley on 07 March 2017

It wouldn't kill hardware sales, if anything it'd help move hardware.

It's software sales it'd kill, I mean just look at the tie-ratio for the PSP.



Mnementh on 07 March 2017
NATO said:
Pemalite said:

There is no such thing as security that is impossible to break.
Otherwise you wouldn't have billions being spent on security by all the worlds governments every year.

it's possible with hardware, but it would require that all development is done in house, no documentation is ever released, no details on the actual chips - not single ic from a generic company, all communication between cpu, gpu, ram, nand etc done encrypted with a unique key, per console, per device, per boot, no exposed vias what so ever, no test points, all writable flash written during manufacturing, no firmware updates, no patches, no webkit, no third party software, plugins, libraries of any kind, unique device-specific coding language, all software done in-house.

It would be unbreakable, but also be prohibitively expensive, and very, very limited.

And even then you would basically be hoping nobody from within the manufacturing, development or software development process were to leak any information.

This still isn't unbreakable. Even if the specs aren't released (which by the way means no 3rd-party-development), you can reverse engineer the stuff and go from where by trying things out. It would be a lot more work, but breaking the thing wouldn't become as much harder as developing for it would. So maybe 10 times development times, 5 times as hard to break in.



3DS-FC: 4511-1768-7903 (Mii-Name: Mnementh), Nintendo-Network-ID: Mnementh, Switch: SW-7706-3819-9381 (Mnementh)

my greatest games: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023

10 years greatest game event!

bets: [peak year] [+], [1], [2], [3], [4]

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NATO on 07 March 2017
Mnementh said:
NATO said:

it's possible with hardware, but it would require that all development is done in house, no documentation is ever released, no details on the actual chips - not single ic from a generic company, all communication between cpu, gpu, ram, nand etc done encrypted with a unique key, per console, per device, per boot, no exposed vias what so ever, no test points, all writable flash written during manufacturing, no firmware updates, no patches, no webkit, no third party software, plugins, libraries of any kind, unique device-specific coding language, all software done in-house.

It would be unbreakable, but also be prohibitively expensive, and very, very limited.

And even then you would basically be hoping nobody from within the manufacturing, development or software development process were to leak any information.

This still isn't unbreakable. Even if the specs aren't released (which by the way means no 3rd-party-development), you can reverse engineer the stuff and go from where by trying things out. It would be a lot more work, but breaking the thing wouldn't become as much harder as developing for it would. So maybe 10 times development times, 5 times as hard to break in.

Without documentation or info on component pinouts, line voltages, bus configuration or knowledge of the architecture used, or the language used for the software running on it, none of what you are saying is possible.

A large part of why systems get hacked is because large portions of the system are well documented or similar to other existing hardware, or common protocols, and leaving testing points and exposed traces for inportant interconnects.



vivster on 07 March 2017
Zkuq said:
vivster said:

Couldn't they invent their own hardware and software architecture that is literally unreadable for common computer hard- and software? They wouldn't even have to encrypt it since the system itself is cryptic. I mean it's proprietary hardware, they can do whatever they want :)

It would require having fully custom hardware and software for reading and writing data as well, which would probably be much more of a pain for Nintendo than having, say, a custom CPU architecture. It's just not practical, and more importantly, security through obscurity is considered a bad practice. Someone's going to figure it out sooner or later anyway.

 

Mnementh said:
vivster said:

Couldn't they invent their own hardware and software architecture that is literally unreadable for common computer hard- and software? They wouldn't even have to encrypt it since the system itself is cryptic. I mean it's proprietary hardware, they can do whatever they want :)

And nobody can program for it? If you can program for it, you have a guide which bytecode means what and can work with that.

We're not talking about usability. It's all about security to keep hackers out as much as possible. The documentation of course would be kept secret by Nintendo and devs would only be able to interact with the hardware via Nintendo developed engines as closed sourced.

Of course it cannot have regular internet as that would mean the console has to parse their own language to the TCP/IP stack and where there is parsing, there is reverse engineering. So they would need their own mobile chips with proprietary network protocols and their own world wide access points.

This actually sounds like fun^^



If you demand respect or gratitude for your volunteer work, you're doing volunteering wrong.

vivster on 07 March 2017
Zkuq said:
Mnementh said:

And nobody can program for it? If you can program for it, you have a guide which bytecode means what and can work with that.

Technically Nintendo could just offer a compiler and not explain how the hardware works. If assembly-level optimizations are common in the game industry, this solution would obviously kill all such optimizations until someone reverse-engineered the system.

That compiler would need really tough encryption though. You can't trust developers to debug the compiling.



If you demand respect or gratitude for your volunteer work, you're doing volunteering wrong.

vivster on 07 March 2017
Mnementh said:
NATO said:

it's possible with hardware, but it would require that all development is done in house, no documentation is ever released, no details on the actual chips - not single ic from a generic company, all communication between cpu, gpu, ram, nand etc done encrypted with a unique key, per console, per device, per boot, no exposed vias what so ever, no test points, all writable flash written during manufacturing, no firmware updates, no patches, no webkit, no third party software, plugins, libraries of any kind, unique device-specific coding language, all software done in-house.

It would be unbreakable, but also be prohibitively expensive, and very, very limited.

And even then you would basically be hoping nobody from within the manufacturing, development or software development process were to leak any information.

This still isn't unbreakable. Even if the specs aren't released (which by the way means no 3rd-party-development), you can reverse engineer the stuff and go from where by trying things out. It would be a lot more work, but breaking the thing wouldn't become as much harder as developing for it would. So maybe 10 times development times, 5 times as hard to break in.

It doesn't have to be hard to develop for. Nintendo will provide native engines, maybe even recompiled existing engines for developers to interact with the hardware. As NATO said, without having any kind of documentation it's close to impossible to reverse engineer while developing for it will just be like learning a new engine.



If you demand respect or gratitude for your volunteer work, you're doing volunteering wrong.

Pemalite on 07 March 2017
NATO said:
Pemalite said:

There is no such thing as security that is impossible to break.
Otherwise you wouldn't have billions being spent on security by all the worlds governments every year.

it's possible with hardware, but it would require that all development is done in house, no documentation is ever released, no details on the actual chips - not single ic from a generic company, all communication between cpu, gpu, ram, nand etc done encrypted with a unique key, per console, per device, per boot, no exposed vias what so ever, no test points, all writable flash written during manufacturing, no firmware updates, no patches, no webkit, no third party software, plugins, libraries of any kind, unique device-specific coding language, all software done in-house.

It would be unbreakable, but also be prohibitively expensive, and very, very limited.

And even then you would basically be hoping nobody from within the manufacturing, development or software development process were to leak any information.

Nope. Some companies have tried that hardware approach, it either got circumvented via software or additional (mod) chips were added to "trick" the hardware block.

It's like your own home, you can place metal bars on the windows, which are alarmed, electrified, have attack dogs, bio-sensors on the locks etc'.
What will happen there is someone will just drug some meat to feed the dogs and smash through the wall instead. (In-fact I have seen this happen in real life in a small community called Yalata here in South Australia.)

Tons of consoles have historically released with minimal documentation, custom or semi-custom chips with hardware-level security... And always, without question, it gets broken eventually.

Besides. You are fogetting that we can see what is in the various chips these days anyway thanks to electron microscopes, it's how the Wii U details got released despite no official information.

vivster said:
Pemalite said:

There is no such thing as security that is impossible to break.
Otherwise you wouldn't have billions being spent on security by all the worlds governments every year.

Not impossible but it would totally annoy the hackers^^

They would have to basically construct their own hardware and then try to reverse engineer the architecture with all of their components and algorithms. As far as offline security goes, that's the best you can do.

Yeah. The best you can do is make it non-viable to crack.
But that is temporary still at best, it only takes a small flaw in the software or the hardware and a system is broken, software and hardware are forever getting more complex which exacerbates the abundance of those flaws.

Take the Sega Saturn for example, it was an expensive, over-engineered tank with a DRM scheme that took 20 years to crack, but it was still cracked.
https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2016/10/how-sega-saturns-20-year-old-drm-was-finally-cracked/

The Wii U got cracked super fast. The Switch looks like it will be cracked even faster.



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