A brief history of Denuvo DRM and the new hypervisor bypass — inside the cat-and-mouse game between Denuvo and the piracy scene

Denuvo is an anti-tamper DRM system developed by Irdeto.

A hypervisor-based bypass (HVBP) is a method used to bypass Denuvo.

A freshly minted HVBP can render Denuvo’s anti-tamper protection virtually useless.

HVBP installs a hypervisor beneath Windows; the hypervisor has metal-level access while Windows runs on it.

HVBP requires disabling almost every Windows low-level security feature; HVBP releases could affect hundreds of thousands of systems, and the scene issues zero-day DRM-free releases.