Starforce protection as I see it...

[Tryst]

No doubt someone will flame me if I'm wrong here but I won't respond to a flame war. All I am doing is relating what I've deduced about the Starforce protection method from various reading sources across the net.

The protection relies on drivers installed silently onto your system. They have been known to disrupt USB devices and cause system slow-downs, CD read errors and other problems. A simple Google search will show that there is a removal tool available since, like a virus, they just re-install themselves again and so manually removing them from device manager will not work.

Here's my theory about how they work and why it isn't possible to crack them so easily.

1. A key is written onto sectors of the CD in batches. Therefore only a certain amount of CD's will work with the key they supply with the game.

2. The drivers decrypt the key written on the CD and so are necessary, however destructive they can be.

3. the Key they supply is entered and combined XOR'd or whatever with the one written on CD.

4. Verification is done by decrypting certain files on the game and checking certain strings of bytes to see if they match a template.

5. The resulting key is used to decrypt the game files.

Since the game files are encrypted using the final key, it's safe to say that the game files are also different on each batch since the CD key and the supplied key are different.

To crack it, you first have to read the key on the CD, decode it and combine it in the same way with the one you manually enter.

Creating a NOCD exe version of the game file will not work since it cannot decrypt the game files. To do this, you would have to crack a 192bit encryption (not easily done and would certainly take time to run).

This is just my conclusion from what I've read about this protection method, don't take it as gospel. I don't claim to be accurate.