Alice Madness Returns, disappointed...

Well, I am shocked, in all my time I have never seen such a sloppy job.

I downloaded the RELOADED release of the game, expecting the game to work, waited for a while for the game to install, only to be greeted by the message "Failed to find default engine .ini file" upon launching the game. I said to myself, its ok , it happens. I tried desperately to fix the issue for half an hour, to no avail.

Then I deemed the release of RELOADED just plain bad, but the madness returns!!
I downloaded the skidrow release, surprise surprise, all missing files were there, I launch the game, greeted by the skidrow logo, then...a crash in kernelbase.dll.

But the madness did not end there, I then started to search for a working crack, I tried a RELOADED crackfix, so far so good, until I actually try to launch it, this time the game did not crash, instead I am greeted with a box saying "The game has been modified or tampered with".
Ridiculous, simply madness, but hey it didn't end there, I downloaded the Theta crackfix, I launch it, bam, crash in kernelbase.DLL.

After wasting over an hour trying to make the game run, I finally gave up.
I have never ever seen such a sloppy attempt to crack a game. It isn't even a crack, but "crac", as its incomplete.

I have not posted in a few days. The reason is because I was preoccupied by SecuROM, for two days straight since my last post I had been working on my dumped exe, figuring out why it crashed beyond a certain point. It took me 2 days, almost sleepless and not eating at all to figure out the problem.

It was difficult as my trace was inconclusive, it showed the main thread simply continuing execution to some invalid address. After working on it for days, I found out that my trace was being b0rked by OllyExt, a plugin for Ollydbg 2.01, so I disabled that and found my problem.

The offending code was a huge jump table, I guess at some point execution jumped to that location, but the jump table itself had unfilled addresses to pointers to the FMOD Sound System.

From then on because of my poor pointer arithmetic skills and almost no knowledge of the PE format, it was a whole day before I wrote a small tool to identify the pointers in the original exe to those in the FMOD Sound system DLL(s). This was further delayed by some unknown bug where the index of an exported function did not match the index of the name array, if it was a C unmangled exported function. All C++ mangled/decorated functions's indexes into the name array were correct.

Then I generated my own table of GetProcAddress-es to include in my stub. After that execution of the exe continued, till I stumbled on another problematic area, of some address not being correct, one that is filled by the SecuROM VM before OEP is reached.

So thats going to take some more days.

RtlUserThreadStart modification.

And back to SecuROM folks. Two days ago I stumbled on some stuff by accident. Turns out, SecuROM modifies the IAT of some modules(predetermined I believe) during runtime, and replaces pointers to various kernel routines such as CreateThread,LoadLibraryExA,LoadlibraryExW,LoadLibraryW to its own obfuscated routines, this in several modules.
I wrote my own tool to repatch back to the old routines. It worked fine after I patched back the old pointers, with the exception of RtlUserThreadStart, securom gets the address of this routine(via GetProcAddress, not in IAT of any module), and modifies this jump at RtlUserThreadStart+0x8, to point to a trampoline jump in a codecave in ntdll.dll, and then another jump back into securom code. If this code is not executed, securom cannot continue, it just waits.

SecuROM v8.10 might pack more than I thought.

Once you bypass the anti-debug APIs, you realise that bypassing those is the easy part, now I feel a bit ashamed that it took me 30 days just to bypass them. Oh well.

I've identified a few threads that are started before OEP which are essential, I've only just started to analyse them, they are obfuscated so reading the assembly will be difficult.

A small sidenote unrelated to all of this. There is a method on the internet for finding out the version of securom, searching for the string 'AddD' will show a version number next to it, for Securom v8, this method no longer works, there is a version displayed, but it's not correct.