CPS2 Moving Slowly Now

The improved attack works, and I've been able to recover a few more keys, but it takes a lot of computation time--several hours per game.

I've also experienced some failures, e.g. I could find the key for dimahoo but not for gmahou. This might have been because of a false positive when looking for pairs with the complementation property, so now I'm trying again with a different pair. Since the searches take so long, experimenting isn't easy.

On the plus side, I've applied the improved attack also to some games for which XOR files were not available, and it worked in a number of cases--though it failed in many others.

One of the new versions supported is mshb, which I is the first Brazilian version of a CPS2 game to work.

Andreas has published details on a theoretical attack using differential cryptanalysis which looks promising. If Andy's calculations are correct, it should allow to retrive the key for the three most problematic games: spf2t, spf2xj, and spf2ta. It does require a lot of (E,D,k) triplets, something in the order of 2¹⁶-2¹⁷, which is a bit steep, but we should be able to do that in a few cases.

One thing to note about my attack, which I might not have explained clearly, is that it requires a remarkably small amount of data: it has worked for many games with just 7 (E,D) pairs. The problem is that those pairs must all be at the same address (as far as the encryption is concerned; that is, bits 1-16 of the address must be the same). Those 7 pairs allow to retrieve the 96-bit key for the second round at that address, and once that is known, the 64-bit master key can be found in less than 1 second, without having to know ANY other (E,D) pair at any address.

Unfortunately for game like spf2t, whose full encryption range covers just 2 repetitions of an address, we are never going to have 7 pairs so the attack will never work.