As an avid pirate, I’ll say these days even the Denuvo game which were going years without cracks now have “cracks”, although they rely on hypervisor fixes and disabling secure boot and giving the hypervisor cracks unfettered access to your system to intercept the Denuvo checks. [0] It’s a dangerous game we’re playing to keep these AAA games bottom lines fat.
[0] https://www.thefpsreview.com/2026/04/03/denuvo-has-been-brok...
* GeForce NOW SDK: https://developer.geforcenow.com/learn/guides/offerings-sdk
* Stadia SDK: developer.stadia.com (offline)
* Xbox Cloud Gaming: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/docs/features/c...
* ...
Just like every Game Store requires its own build: Steamworks SDK, even GOG: https://docs.gog.com/sdk/
Some games allow browsing files locally for savegames, music libray, ... . Imagine if you could do that on the cloud VM.
...making it even more clear what "secure" boot actually secures: the control others have over your own computer.
If you own the computer yourself, you "ought" to be able to turn off these measures in a way that is undetectable. Being unable to do so would be the red line imho - and looking at those hypervisor cracks available, it's not quite being crossed. The pessimistic, but realistic future prediction is that various media companies would want and lobby for machines to have unbreakable enclaves for which they can "trust" to DRM your machine, and it's just boiling the frog right now. Windows 11's new TPM requirement is testament to that.
Switch to linux asap - that's about the only thing a consumer is capable of doing.
Measured boot is actually better for that: You can still boot whatever you want however you want, but hashes are different which can be used for e.g. remote attestation. Secure boot has to prevent that "unauthorized" code (whatever that means for each setup) can ever run. If it does, game over. That means less freedom and flexibility.
If you're starting to think "huh, maybe that's why these age verification laws suddenly became all the rage", you're onto something. Whatever the case, "general purpose computing" is definitely cooked.
that being said, it does assume a certain trust in firmware vendors / oems. If you dont trust those, then dont buy from them.
i think for most ppl trusting OEM or trusting rando from interwebz with a custom hypervisor and requirement to cripple my system security are totally different things ..
u know they could actually make theyr HV support secure boot etc. to do it properly and have ur system run the cracks but not have gaping holes left by them -_-. lazy.
Boring claim, obviously true.
> and result in a situation worse than not having secure boot to begin with
A very big claim that requires evidence.
Which provides way more information than the article
I don't think any competent security researcher has anything positive to say about "security through obscurity"
at best this is lawyer position
Obscurity is totally underrated. Attacker resources are limited.
Sure it's not a security measure as such, but it's still a worthwile component to the overall defense system.
This isn't about security of the same kind as authentication/encryption etc where security by obscurity is a bad idea. This is an effort where obscurity is almost the only idea there is, and where even a marginal increase in difficulty for tampering/inspecting/exploiting is well worth it.
Take the PS5 for example. It has execute-only memory. Even if you find a bug, how do you exploit it if you can't read the executable text of your ROP/JOP target?
Some people find cracking them interesting and fun.
The goal is not perfect security in all situations for all products. The goal is to make the effort required for your particular product excessive compared to the payoff.
I have no idea why would anyone want to do that on Nintendo Switch though, Switch 1 doesn't have any headroom and Switch 2 OS security hasn't been defeated yet.
- from the slides
So, money, for supposed control. Which is not true of course