Voksi Releases Detailed Denuvo-Cracking Video Tutorial

[Megalith]

21-year-old Bulgarian cracker Voksi has revealed how he beat version 4.9 of Denuvo, which kept Assassin’s Creed Origins out of pirates’ hands for the last few months. The video is pretty dry and technical, but it does provide insight into the complexities and inner workings of DRM.

Voksi says his entire cracking career began with this one indie game and his desire to play it with his best friend. Prior to that, he had absolutely no experience at all. He says he’s taken no university courses or any course at all for that matter. Everything he knows has come from material he’s found online. But the intrigue doesn’t stop there.

 

[gxp500]

I don’t even know how to code properly in high-level language like C#, C++, etc. But I understand assembly language perfectly fine

He's the one.

 

[greenman]

How is this even legal? An official youtube account and everything.

 

[the-one1]

He's the one.

Me?

 

[gamerk2]

He's the one.

Assembly is actually a lot easier to understand then higher level languages. Sure, it's verbose as hell, but it's not like there's a lot of mystery there.

 

[katanaD]

He says he’s taken no university courses or any course at all for that matter.

thats one of the real kickers with computers. By the time they are teaching it in a school.. its old and obsolete, for the most part.

 

[Master_shake_]

How is this even legal? An official youtube account and everything.

Does Bulgaria have draconian copyright laws?

 

[RPGWiZaRD]

That's a genius right there how he self handely thaught assembly like this, curious how it has stayed this long out there though, would expected this to be taken down pretty quickly, at this point this will never disappear from the Internetz.

 

[63jax]

God bless him!

 

[Spidey329]

That's a genius right there how he self handely thaught assembly like this, curious how it has stayed this long out there though, would expected this to be taken down pretty quickly, at this point this will never disappear from the Internetz.

The usual tricks to scrub the videos won't work because he's not using any copyrighted materials or music - that's usually how they abuse ContentID to take something down (file a complaint for a copyright you don't even own).

 

[Maxx]

If you recall the article from a while back with the claim of a Denuvo performance hit, he was the person sourced for comments about it. I found it amusing then because people said things like, "I won't take the word of some random cracker," when anybody in the scene knows exactly who he is (and he is generally publicly available).

 

[Simmonz]

He grabbed that DRM by the pussy !

 

[DPI]

If you recall the article from a while back with the claim of a Denuvo performance hit, he was the person sourced for comments about it. I found it amusing then because people said things like, "I won't take the word of some random cracker," when anybody in the scene knows exactly who he is (and he is generally publicly available).

Well the Denuvo performance hit claim a while back was literally just a screenshot of a debugger window and a post on reddit that "when the character moves I see the copy protection (VMP) doing something". That was it. And a game of telephone operator ensued with that story becoming "Cracker proves Denuvo kills CPU!" urban legend BS.

Every time Denuvo has been removed from a game by the developer and reissued, it has benchmarked exactly the same as with Denuvo. If that wasn't the case, then pirates and pro-piracy blogs would be screaming the difference from the rooftops. The performance-killing claims remain unsubstantiated FUD.

 

[Maxx]

Well the Denuvo performance hit claim a while back was literally just a screenshot of a debugger window and a post on reddit that "when the character moves I see the copy protection (VMP) doing something". That was it. And a game of telephone operator ensued with that story becoming "Cracker proves Denuvo kills CPU!" urban legend BS.

Every time Denuvo has been removed from a game by the developer and reissued, it has benchmarked exactly the same as with Denuvo. If that wasn't the case, then pirates and pro-piracy blogs would be screaming the difference from the rooftops. The performance-killing claims remain unsubstantiated FUD.

Well, I've tested it thoroughly and the highest hit I've ever seen was ~5%. It's more or less insignificant, <1% in most cases. I've stated that before so I am by no means defending that assertion as it was taken out of context for sure, I'm just pointing out that this guy DOES know what he's talking about. It was other/third parties who abused what he had said about it.

That being said when Origins came out I tested it and it definitely has weird things going on performance wise, but people jumped the gun in blaming Denuvo; my personal belief at the time (and that remains true) is that Ubisoft coded the game (and actually another upcoming game from what I can ascertain) towards the Coffee Lake chips. I did not post that here as I'd rather not get challenged on my theory but I'm stating it here since I'm pointedly saying it was NOT Denuvo that caused that weirdness. (although I am still of the belief Intel worked with them on Origins and another game to purposefully show Ryzen in a bad light compared to CFL - this coming from an Intel fan who criticized Ryzen in the past)