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by cdmckay 2743 days ago
I think if getting the SDK was enough to crack the copy protection, it would’ve happened eventually.

The key seemed to be the descrambler.

Why on earth did they scramble the executable in a deterministic way?

2 comments

Dunno, you could try asking Sony, who helpfully used the same random input for every PS3 ECDSA signature, thereby leaking enough information to let people recover their private key.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_homebrew#Private...

(I would _suspect_ that internally, they deliberately made this choice, so that the same inputs would produce the same output, because someone important thought that was valuable and either didn't know or thought it wasn't risky enough to possibly leak key information by doing this. But I have no special knowledge, just a suspicion that people who pick elliptic curve crypto would be aware of the leaks involved in reusing IVs.)

Why on earth did they scramble the executable in a deterministic way?

Because they wanted official developers to be able to create MIL-CDs that would load.

They just didn't want anyone else being able to do that.

Just seems like inevitably people would figure it out.