alt Hacker NewsBinary obfuscation used in AAA Games
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This is decidedly not what I’d expect to be discussed at Thotcon. That said, super interesting!
As an avid pirate, I’ll say these days even the Denuvo game which were going years without cracks now have “cracks”, although they rely on hypervisor fixes and disabling secure boot and giving the hypervisor cracks unfettered access to your system to intercept the Denuvo checks. [0] It’s a dangerous game we’re playing to keep these AAA games bottom lines fat.
[0] https://www.thefpsreview.com/2026/04/03/denuvo-has-been-brok...
> While security researchers love the entropy of randomized function layouts
I don't think any competent security researcher has anything positive to say about "security through obscurity"
at best this is lawyer position
I’ve noticed that LLMs can effortlessly read minified JS. How does it do with obfuscated binary code? I wonder if the days of obfuscation are numbered when the tedious job of de-obfuscation can be automated.
Between this and rootkits masquerading as anticheat, video games are starting to look indistinguishable from malware
I'm a bit perplexed by the choice of Nintendo Switch as the example hardware. I was under the impression that the switch was locked down and you can't run offset based cheat software like cheatengine on it.
Echoing the other comments here - why? What is the threat model here and how does this protect you from it?
oh fascinating. i just finished reverse engineering Aegis and now working on their newest Eidolon. pretty cool technology.
and this is insight from "other" side :) https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/overwatch/639855-overwatc...
The amount of work that goes into moats, for stuff that nobody will care about in 6 months, is kind of insane. I understand it for security reasons, but in video games? Just more bloat for nothing
Link to the slides (almost missed it when i was reading): https://farzon.org/files/presentations/Thotcon_talk_may_2025...
Which provides way more information than the article