I had so much problem with crappy cloned GBA karts (EEPROM fails to retain saved data, kart that just don't work) that I've decided to stick to original DS kart after I've got my swanky new NDS lite.

You don't need to get all the DS karts out there, just buy the ones you really like. If you're short on cash just trade your original ones here with fellow NDS enthusiast. In a long run you'll be getting more from your original karts than your cloned ones.

This post has been edited by ray_: Jun 15 2006, 11:08 AM

It's virtually impossible to break a public key cypher nowadays. In fact the death knell of the PSP security is not the cypher, its cypher is intact and has never been broken into. It is actually a vunerability of the firmware. Crackers were able to circumvent this by fooling the PSP into running their custom built cracking codes. Thus circumventing the need to authenticate your games. The gist of it is to get PSP to run the cracker's code in privilege mode that allows you to put a non-authenticated EBOOT into the PSP system space, that non-authenticated EBOOT is modified to run your pirated UMDs without requiring any authentication.

You can get more information here

EDIT: This is the same reason for the need to reflash your NDS firmware to play ROMs and pirated cartridges, essentially to place cracking codes that circumvents authentication.

This post has been edited by ray_: Jun 15 2006, 11:39 PM

I know zit about how DS authentication works either. But I'm pretty sure it's easier to alter codes that does the authentication than to do the crazy maths that's involved to break a cipher.

A 1024-bit keysize will take 300,000,000,000 MIPS-year to crack. That is, it takes a CPU running at 1,000,000 million instructions per year 300,000,000,000 years to crack. To put things in perspective, the current lean-and-mean 1billion transistors Itanium would probably have a best estimate of 125,000 million instructions per second. You'll need a super-computer to get any result at all. That is a very long time to deduce a private key.

But the hash function (MD5/SHA-1) required for text signing does seems easier to break. In fact, I've heard of one successful attempt. Using collision detection, one could spoof your signature. Still this is pretty hard, and it gets harder as the hash digest size increases. There's 4 billion chance you could get a collision with a 32-bit hash digest and SHA-1 uses 160-bit hash!

And the beauty of this is that as time passes and new hardware surfaces, we'll just be seeing bigger crypto key size and bigger hash digest that would exponentially increase the time that a cracker would take to compromise them.

You can get more info on public key crypto attacks here. PGP is a popular public key encryption program.

This post has been edited by ray_: Jun 16 2006, 09:48 AM

You seem pretty adamant.

I highly doubt that.

http://www.bottledlight.com/ds/index.php/H...are/Passthrough

"A passthrough technique is required, since the DS BIOS enables encryption after reading the header, and the encryption is not fully understood."

How could they not understand the encryption used and claim that it is broken. Further more Passthrough is really a technic to bypass the need to read from the header to prevent DS from enabling encryption. Again by altering the behaviour of the code.

EDIT: Also the same person that claims that the cartridge encryption is broken is also responsible for turning DSes into bricks.

http://ds.qj.net/index.php?pg=49&aid=1628



This post has been edited by ray_: Jun 16 2006, 04:11 PM

Point taken , and to steer this back to our topic, these DS carts are prove enough that the cartridge encryption is intact. Like Satanduck so skillfully points out, you'll still need your DS flashed to run any of these cloned "goodness".