Friday, November 24, 2006

PSP homebrewers develop DRM

Xart, a hobbyist PSP game-maker, has created a DRM system for his games. Creators of unauthorized homebrew games for the PSP worry that others will strip their names off of their creations and appropriate credit for their work, so Xart has proposed that the splash-screens that appear before the game starts should be encrypted so that they can't be altered.

Of course, the homebrew PSP scene exists because this sort of thing just doesn't work. It's impossible to deliver a game to a user with an encrypted section and the keys to decrypt it and expect that the user won't be able to decrypt it.

On the one hand, it's pretty unlikely that a homebrew hobbyist will use the DMCA to attack people who break their crypto, and it's reasonable to want to keep the credit intact on your works. On the other hand, this stuff really doesn't work, and no one should know that better than a PSP hobbyist.

With some people trying to rip off the homebrew scene, pretending to be Dark_Alex or some of our other respected devs, Xart from our forums has come up with a great new idea to prevent people ripping off others work. Xart has developed a powerful, fast Data Array Scrambling (DAS) system to protect your homebrew games and applications from hex editing and others stealing credit from your hard work.

This is an example of an encryption technique and it not a yet full release. For this Xart has used his xLoader application. It's a proof of concept to show just how quick encryption can be done to protect your work.

Link(Thanks, Hamish!)

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