[eps]

The fun fact time.

Denuvo DRM happens to be... a repackaged VMProtect. Moreover VMP devs were suing Denuvo for illegally repackaging and selling a _single copy_ of VMP that Denuvo bought from them and then actively trying to evade paying licesning fees. Apparently prior to that Denuvo was talking to VMP about doing some custom development work, but they weren't able to agree on terms. [1]

VMProtect itself is a well-established virtualization-based DRM solution and it does dramatically increase the complexity of cracking of binaries. It's been around for a while now and it's popular in shareware circles as a successor to Armadillo protector, which too was a form of a code virtualizer. From what I've seen said about VMP, it is stable and reasonably light, so Assassin's Creed maxing out CPUs is more likely the Creed's own problem rather that of the VMP.

[1] https://rsdn.org/forum/shareware/6733344 (in Russian)

[maccard]

According to VMProtect, that's not true [0]

[0] http://vmpsoft.com/20170606/vmprotect-and-denuvo-gmbh/

[eps]

They settled.

The post I linked to is from March, when this circus was just getting started, and the post is by none other than the VMPSoft founder himself.