Good post on an interesting topic.
Don't have such high hopes for the rumored crack by Bronco. And RELOADED did not do anything in that crack. Bronco just happened to use a Steam emulator made by RLD back in 2013. Either way,it does not seem to be in his intent to release a public crack. He merely showed the fact that Denuvo is vulnerable and from what I have seen in exelab so far, he either wants to get paid by Denuvo or get recruited by them. It's highly unlikely he would make a public crack with step by step instructions on how to take down Denuvo's VM. Plus, I do not believe he has totally cracked the protection as he claims so far. Partially maybe, but not completely. I think the crack only works in his machine. In the video he did not speak anything about cracking the CPUID part of Denuvo which makes the protection work uniquely in each different hardware configuration.
MKDEV - This guy seems to work hard but his method is unfortunately painstaking and time consuming. His workaround is essentially a bypass of Denuvo and it's a form of brute forcing. He chooses to manually find Denuvo triggers one by one in game and NOP them. This is going to take him a long while as Denuvo has thousands of triggers in one game, unless he find some way of automating this process. And with this method, him cracking one Denuvo protected game does not make cracking the next one any easier. He would have to again hunt down all the triggers for that game and remove them, which again would take almost the same amount of time.
Couple of other things to add to your excellent post :
The scene is a shadow of what it used to be 10 years ago. The countless FBI raids and simply warez group members growing up and having families has driven lots of groups to inactivity. There was a time when the scene cracked almost every single protection within days when groups like HATRED, DEVIANCE, FLT, Razor1911, etc were active. But now, the thirst just does not seem to be there.
Fairlight - Has never been the same since FBI raids hit them. They now only release either games with no protection or basic Steam emulation. I really doubt any of the original FLT crackers are with the group although they use the name in new releases..
Razor1911 - Pretty much disbanded after their main cracker DYCUS died of cancer back in 2012. They have only released basic steam emulation cracks since then.
RELOADED - They were releasing just basic Steam cracks for a couple of years. I thought they were dead and gone until I noticed something very recently. In their update release for GTA 5 (not something that was very popular as it was just an update), RELOADED cracked Arxan. Arxan is an anti tamper solution just like Denuvo, and RELOADED completely cracked and removed it with no bypass or emulation. It shows that they are far from inactive.
Speaking of RELOADED, I will never forget them for one thing they did. Back in the early 2000s there was a protection called Starforce which apparently no one could remove. Games protected by Starforce 3 remained uncracked and one game, Splilter Cell Chaos Theory remained uncracked more than a year for 470 something days. It was pretty much similar to current situation with Denuvo except you could bypass Starforce to some extent by using tricks like physically removing all of your IDE drives. Either way, RELOADED in 2006 released extensive documentation on how to completely remove Starforce from a game
http://scenenotice.org/details.php?id=1728 . Needless to say they destroyed Starforce with that.
Denuvo
It really is not uncrackable. And it is not some magic protection as their PR team would have you believe. Denuvo is not fundamentally different from protections such as Starforce, Securom, SolidShild or TAGES. It it fact is built by one of the ex developers of Securom.
At the heart of Denuvo is VMProtect. Something crackers have cracked over he years since 2006. They use some kind of forked version of VMProtect v3. What really has it going for them are two main factors :
- Inactivity of cracking community - No one seems to want or have time to set aside a couple of months to properly reverse engineer the protection.
- State of X64 debuggers - This is not to say this is a blocker. People have cracked games with far less sophisticated tools in the past. But Denuvo being x64 only gives them an advantage.
And one last thing, if a scene group is working at cracking Denuvo, you likely wont have announcements from them on forums or status updates. You will see it only when it's out.
so i will do another thread to correct my mistake.
