From the amount of activity and how much this all smells like heavy AI usage, I have zero doubt that something will be working shortly after launch. The agents won’t sleep until it boots.
This project is the first hint I’ve seen of the complete destruction of all copy protection schemes. Scary times for any industry that relies on those!
You are less likely to double dip as a PC player if it’s available in a timely manner. However right now there is a lot of PC players that will buy the console version just because it’s available and there is no announcement for the PC version. And then buy again in a year or so when the PC version comes out with the ability to crank the graphics settings up.
No, to decrypt the game and make it possible to rip you need a current firmware exploit/jailbreak. Until the firmware that GTA 6 requires is jailbroken it won't even be possible to rip it, nevermind emulate it.
This was my initial thought and a sentiment I've seen expressed elsewhere, but I think I'm missing something about how they'd implement this.
Sure, Rockstar can enforce a minimum software revision to launch the game, but couldn't some homebrew software just (a) lie about the software revision to any running game, or (b) apply any relevant software updates minus patching the kernel vuln?
That's not how attestation infrastructures work. Obviously they thought of all that.
Modern hardware attestation is - if implemented correctly - not beatable unless you decap chips and start trying to extract hardware keys. But the silicon itself is often heavily obfuscated and such a feat has not been demonstrated for modern hardware.
All breaks of modern console security rely on finding bugs or mistakes in the implementation. If the PS5 has got serious exploits then either:
1. They will patch it and revoke old firmwares, as the infrastructure lets them do. Then you have to try and find a new exploit in the firmware that GTA6 was released for.
2. It won't be released for PS5 until later. Xbox security has been undefeated for a long time now, so Microsoft might have an advantage there.
The way downloading games works on PS5 is your console asks PSN for a ticket using hardware attestation and account tokens, PSN checks if you own the game and gives you the keys. It's not doing attestation on every game start because that would make offline play impossible, and it wouldn't be effective against jailbreaks anyway.
If someone manages to download and decrypt the game on 1 single hacked console then it's out forever. Even if Sony decides to only allow unhacked firmware it's only a matter of time (months not years) before that version gets a jailbreak too because no complex system can be totally secure.
The only way to prevent this is making the game online only. That would be an extreme sales and reputation hit because it's the type of thing people expect from EA games where single player is a side mode. Not Rockstar famous for their incredible story modes that have always been offline.
Then you can see from projects like ReSkate that to successfully pull it off you would need to make the game effectively a thin client, because if you leave any logic on the console it will get reversed even if parts of it are server only.
And running a full game engine millions of times on your servers gets expensive real fast. Take Two can't afford it, and even if they could, the hit to their profits would be way more than what they can lose from the game getting cracked day 1.
So it's not feasible to fiddle with incoming firmware
updates, even with the level of access Relapse gives? I couldn't imagine how such a thing would be implemented. A hypervisor?
Yes all modern console RA systems have a verified boot rooted in hardware that chains to a hypervisor. They also encrypt all code and network traffic, use revokable per-CPU hardware keys, and can tie game releases or updates to revokable firmware versions.
The underlying architectures are quite complex but there are some good tech talks about them online. One of the best is by Tony Chen, which covers Xbox One security. It's many years obsolete now, but even that security system wasn't cracked until long after obsolescence. Microsoft have proven you can build an effectively unbeatable security system for general computing devices even though they only use it for games and multiplayer anti-cheat. It seems Sony might have not reached Microsoft's level.
Maybe AI will speed things up by making it easier to find obscure bugs, but design wise the architectures are sound and can work well.
You need to get the game in the first place, which requires a console that’s authorized to download games from PSN.
I don’t know how Sonys attestation works, and how resistant it is; but presumably it’s a bit harder than “lie to the game about what firmware you’re running”.
(GTA VI will famously not have a physical release, so you can’t rip data off the disk.)
A trivial scheme would be to distribute some shared secret key in a new update, and require it to be supplied back on connections to Sony's servers. In order to extract that key in order to replay it from an older firmware, you'd need to have root on the new firmware.
