CDV Officially Drops Starforce Copy Protection

simoniker writes "Publisher CDV has officially announced that it is dropping the controversial StarForce game copy protection scheme from its games, and is using the TAGES protection scheme instead, in what it calls 'response to consumer demand'. This follows Ubisoft's dropping of the scheme in April, as controversy continues about StarForce's allegedly negative effect on PCs. However, it's notable that the StarForce drivers have just passed Microsoft's 'Designed for Windows XP' certification programme, according to the company's official website."

Comments

TAGES

[Kadin2048]

I thought it was interesting that the one thing that the summary didn't link to was any information on the new scheme, TAGES.

A quick Google brought me to their site. It's mostly corporate PR-speak fluff, but there are some hints there:

Our main technical asset is our specific mastering process which builds up a programmable "secure area" on the disc. The secured area is used to protect useful application data sets or encryption keys. ... With TAGES(TM) there will never be a generic crack, and there will never be one-to-one copies. It is physically impossible. ... Nevertheless, we consider emulators to be a real threat and have all the necessary flexibility to be able to react immediately, with much more powerful solutions than blacklists - which are a very limited answer to emulation.

I don't buy the whole "physical impossibility" part. If you can read the data off of the disk with their special APIs and drivers, then those drivers can be reverse-engineered and someone else peel the data off and distribute a hacked version. The data is there, on the disk, they're just storing it in a way that the system can't normally access, without special code that they license out and allow software developers to integrate into their protected application. It's the same thing that game developers have done for years -- there were some old Apple II titles that did strange things with the floppy drive in order to pull off similar tricks.

*yawn* At any rate, just more security through obscurity. Not that I care, particularly, as I don't run Windows (or, for that matter, play games), but I find the whole area interesting enough to keep an eye on.

Re:TAGES

[LiquidCoooled]

I found an article about tages which explains how it works quite nicely (infact its the discussion where the protection is essentially given an autopsy).
Theres enough info there to understand the way it works.

Have a read of it

Its all about how the disk is corrupted by having 2 index links on the disk both point at a a sector with the same identifier, but that when the disc head is travelling in one direction (as the disc rippers do) it misses completely the data hidden in the duplicated sector.
The only way to find the duplicated sector is to read the disc backwards.
Doing a diff on the 2 images will identify the hidden data.

(at least it sounds reasonable...)

Your right not to buy it

[SmallFurryCreature]

This is further down on the google result for TAGES and seems to show that TAGES is actually easier to defeat then the other methods.

Then again, ALL of them have been defeated so is there any point in being the one that took the most time?

Is TAGES however friendlier to the paying customer? Since none of the copy protections systems work the only thing that can be hoped for is that they inconvenience the paying customer as little as possible.

Offcourse no copy protection at all would be the easiest way not to upset paying customers but lets not get silly shall we? The paying customers must be hurt to pay for the pirates!

I say we whip all airline passengers to punish them for drug smugglers, you know it makes sense.