Denuvo has been effectively compromised by a new type of exploit that has cracked many popular games.
Hypervisor-based bypasses, which function beneath the Windows operating system at Ring -1, are now facilitating the pirating of major gaming titles within hours of their official release.
TorrentFreak has confirmed that notable games under Denuvo such as Crimson Desert, Life is Strange: Reunion, and the long-anticipated Assassin’s Creed Shadows have all been cracked using this new method.
The mechanics involved are fundamentally distinct from traditional Denuvo cracking, which necessitated months of careful reverse engineering.
How does the cracking method work?
Rather than directly targeting the DRM, the hypervisor method installs a community-developed virtualisation layer that operates below Windows and intercepts Denuvo’s CPU instruction checks, providing false validation data in return.
Since this layer functions at a higher privilege level than the operating system itself, Denuvo’s conventional detection techniques are effectively oblivious to it.
However, the unfortunate news for gamers who find this appealing is that the bypass entails significant personal security risks.
Implementing it usually requires disabling Secure Boot, Virtualisation-Based Security, and other Windows boot-level safeguards.
Consequently, the hypervisor gains near-unrestricted access to hardware, making the system highly vulnerable to kernel-level malware with no simple recovery options.
Irdeto, the parent company of Denuvo, has confirmed to TorrentFreak that countermeasures are already in the works.
Irdeto’s head of communications, Daniel Butschek, stated clearly, “We’re already working on updated security versions for games affected by hypervisor bypasses. For players, performance will not be compromised by these enhanced security measures.”
Regardless of the associated risks, the frequency of hypervisor cracks appears to have significantly increased. A list on Reddit suggests that many games protected by Denuvo DRM have been compromised, leaving only a small number uncracked.
Furthermore, developers have chosen to eliminate Denuvo from an increasing number of their games.
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