It looks like bittorent version 2 hashes with sha-256 at a 16kb resolution.

pieces root

For non-empty files this is the the root hash of a merkle tree with a branching factor of 2, constructed from 16KiB blocks of the file. The last block may be shorter than 16KiB. The remaining leaf hashes beyond the end of the file required to construct upper layers of the merkle tree are set to zero. As of meta version 2 SHA2-256 is used as digest function for the merkle tree. The hash is stored in its binary form, not as human-readable string.

Seems like that should be easily parallelizable and can fit into thread memory on a modern GPU.

It would just depend on how many 16kb blocks are remaining in that 0.1%

I wonder how viable it would be to bruteforce it. Not a serious proposal but still fun to think about

I mean sure yeah you can “just” buy a whole new PC and then learn how to reverse malware without getting pwned so you can save yourself like $80 on some random AAA slopware. Be realistic, does it sound like OP is gonna do that?

I mean power to anyone who does take that route, but we have to acknowledge that 99% of people are not going to.

Generally I’d say they’re one of the most dangerous things you could voluntarily run on your PC. As someone whose education and profession is in infosec, games are one of the things I refuse to pirate because the risk is just too high for me.

Just running an untrusted exe from a shady source is enough to make my hair stand on end but the idea of intentionally replacing low level hypervisor components makes me run away screaming.

FWIW, the type of games that require HV bypasses are ones that I would pass on because the “legitimate” DRM is basically equally as scary from a security perspective.

Everyone’s risk tolerance is different though. 🤷‍♂️

Still makes it effectively 1000x harder than just having the same account forever. Because now you need a new stolen credit card account for every new release.