Question regarding investigating encryption used on game archives.

[L33THAK0R]

Hi all,

I've been looking into the "*.dat" archives of a title called, "Beat Hazard", its nothing too special except for the fact the archives seem to be encrypted, making re-compression quite uneventful.

It made me realise I don't really know all that much about investigating encrypted assets, I have a working theory based on memory usage, the time taken at boot as the fact the archives don't have any common plaintext header information, to come to the conclusion that the title probably decrypts and loads its assets into memory, but I'm not too sure how to go about investigating this other than assuming a memory debugger might be of use.

I'm hoping it'll be as simple as a XOR cipher but I'm honestly a bit lost as to where I should start looking to figure this out definitively.

I also know this sort of question is probably a bit outside the scope of the forum but I thought I'd ask here before going to another research forum like Xentax or Zenhax, just in case anyone might be generous enough to point me in the right direction.