Wii Uses Elliptic Curve Cryptography For Saves

An anonymous reader writes "A user at the Nintendo-Scene forums just posted a lengthy post about his discovery that the Wii savegame files are signed and encrypted with NIST B 233 bit elliptic curve cryptography. Could this be the first step for a Wii softmod the homebrew community have waited for? From the post: 'It appears a Wii savegame file ends with a certificate chain. The certificates contains a public keypair (the one that is being "certified") and a signature (another number pair) from the signing entity. The number pairs are stored as a compound 60 bit data (first 30 bytes for the first number, and the next 30 bytes for the second). Hence, the first and middle byte is always 00 or 01 for keys, and 00 for signatures. One can check that the keys are indeed NIST B 233 keys using openssls EC_KEY_check_key function (code forthcoming).'"

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that we live in a world where our console gamesaves are protected more aggressively than our bank accounts and our identities combined?

Re:Uhh

[Headcase88]

In terms of bricking consoles, Nintendo's a little bit nicer about it. They'll still brick it, but they'll warn you first "hey, if your console is modded, this update's going to brick it, so you might want to abort now".

By the way, with some games refusing to run without updating, this becomes one of those scenarios where if your console is modded, you have to get games illegally to make them work (assuming pirates have found a way to eliminate the code that forces the update).

Re:Mod parent troll

[farkus888]

I think they absolutely love us. the kind of money they are making on those of us who play their games is more than enough to get us past the "no kissing on the lips" rule. I am by no means a nintendo fanboy, I haven't even played video games consistently for almost 7 years. I am speaking their praises because they built a system that is cool enough to play to get me back in to gaming. I know there are some crazy nintendo is always right people but don't discredit everyone who sings the wii's praises. and yeah I know you weren't speaking directly to me.

Re:WTF?

[noidentity]

The governments of the world don't need easy access to your game saves, apparently.

Re:More important than homebrew potential

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not interested in hacking my saves and would like to know people I am playing against online are not cheating, so this is something I would request

But the point is, it never works. Anti-cheat protection always gets broken. I've personally made bots for every Unreal engine since UT99. It's only a deterrence for less intelligent cheaters and barely that. If you want to cheat at a game there's always a way. It's an exercise in futility to try to stop it.

Another problem is that anti-cheat protection makes developers lazy. Online games typically follow the server-client model and as such, any important calculations that need to be tamper-proof should be done on the server. Unfortunately you've got one of the most popular MMO games, MapleStory, that actually depends on the client to detect if the player has been hit by a monster. They rely on anti-cheat protection to keep a player from bypassing all hit detections and obtaining God mode. The problem is, they've already lost. Their code will never be bullet proof as long as I control the hardware.

Re:Uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes because Nintendo forced you to mod your Wii. Oh wait, no you chose to do that so you could play pirated games in the first place.

Re:Uhh

[Antique Geekmeister]

No, the most worrying for Nintendo is successful emulators that can run on non-Nintendo hardware. By locking down the savefiles, they retain control over savefiles, and over the ability of emulators to successfully save at all.

Re:Great, now about the next step.

[Donniedarkness]

Regarding the part about the wireless SNES controller:

Have you seen Nintendo's "Classic controller" that they offer (primarily for the virtual console games)? It looks a little odd, but after you start using it, you'll realize that it's really an SNES controller with some analog sticks thrown on at the bottom (and two extra "shoulder" buttons). Also, it plugs into the wii-remote, so I consider it semi-wireless.

Anyways, definately my favourite controller ever, so you should give it a try, if you haven't yet.

"no user servicable parts inside"

[da5idnetlimit.com]

I happen to have a modded Xbox and a modded Wii

the Xbox has been my media center for about 4 years. I bought it the day it was easily moddable/hackable. It now plays the anime and movies from my server and also plays my dvds along with the games and imports. I really like the option to pay imports. I do speak and understand english, so there really is no reason I should wait 1-2 years for a game. Or movie...

After maybe 2.5 years the dvd reader died and I couldn't read discs anymore. I bought a replacement dvd player for the xbox and installed it myself, voiding my already dead warranty.

Morale of the story :

1 / I used my xbox in a "creative" way, exceeding by much what MS previewed/allowed me to do with it. I had fun with it, and I didn't have to build or buy a pre-made media center.

2 / When it got broken I just had to buy a small, cheap part. not a full xbox, as a "no user servicable parts inside" box concept would have made me.

Episode 2, the WII

Take story from ep.1, make hardware standard pc stuff as in xbox, rinse, repeat.

Guess I, too, am just old fashioned in some ways. I'm too cheap to have every piece of kit I want, so I like to tinker with consoles to give them all the bells and whistles I cannot afford otherwise...

You may not like the answer, but...

[Xenographic]

Clearly, the people who make our video games are far more competent than those protecting those other things like votes, money, identity, etc.

Actually, it makes a sort of perverse sense. It's pretty easy to write bog-standard business applications that do CRUD (in both the database & other sense), but it's not so easy to program a game that has to run at acceptable frame rates.

Re:Autosave to defeat quickloading?

[UnknownSoldier]

> Some games save continuously because t

The Wii Programming Guidelines (or Lot Check docs -- don't have the info at home but at work) dictate a maximum number of saving k/sec so as not to wear out the flash memory.