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by nebulous1 2335 days ago
> Spoilers: the teenagers will always win; you can never trust a client no matter how many technical barriers you erect.

I think if we accept sgx type technology onto our systems then they can at some stage win this battle, at least theoretically. This is assuming that the sgx-like tech cant be practicably attacked, which isnt currently a valid assumption but could, at least theoretically, be in the future.

This differs from non-hardware drm which is basically just obfuscation, and which the method they're currently describing is merely an extension of.
2 comments
toast0 2335 days ago
SGX is theoretically strong, but the implementation matters. If the motivation and budget is there, SGX enabled chips could be decapped and reverse engineered. It would be an immense challenge though, so I doubt the budget would be there for cheating. Implementation errors are a more realistic target.

But, assuming you can't cheat on the system itself, you can probably cheat with the video/audio signal and generating USB inputs. It's harder than reading ram, but it's not feasible to stop it. At that point, you have to depend on behavioral targeting and what not (which they're already doing)

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sudosysgen 2334 days ago
Even SGX based methods could be bypassed.

You could do DMA on the video-game memory, you could plug the monitor HDMI cable into a raspberry pi 5 or 6 camera input and do framebuffer based aimbot, you could stealthily modify the GPU drivers to give you data before some processing stages (you could probably do that without leaving anything in CPU RAM for too long), and so on.

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nebulous1 2334 days ago
> could do DMA on the video-game memory

The SGX won't allow you do this as the memory is encrypted

> plug the monitor HDMI cable into a raspberry pi 5 or 6

I don't know if the pi is powerful enough for that or not, and a HDCP type extension to what's coming out of the SGX could stop it, but ultimately yeah, you could have a robot play the game for you.

> stealthily modify the GPU drivers

Again, SGX type systems aren't going to allow that. This side of SGX type systems is all about trying to make your computer act how the developer wanted it to, regardless of your wishes or a malicious actor's wishes.

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