Nintendo sent a request to GitHub to block the Lockpick and Lockpick_RCM repositories, as well as about 80 forks of them. The claim is submitted under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The projects are accused of violating Nintendo's intellectual property and bypassing the protection technologies used in the Nintendo Switch consoles. Currently, the application is under consideration in GitHub and the blocking has not yet been applied (deletion is made one day after the warning was sent to the authors).
The Nintendo Switch and the games it ships with have several security mechanisms in place to limit the ability of the console to run only legally purchased video games. Such a restriction is aimed at preventing the launch of pirated copies of games and protecting users from copying their games for subsequent launch on unauthorized devices.
The Lockpick repository is developing an open utility for extracting keys from Nintendo Switch game consoles, and the Lockpick_RCM repository contains components that can be downloaded on the device to obtain encryption keys for various components of the operating system. Using the tools in question, the user can extract the keys for the firmware components installed on his console and his legally purchased games.
The authors of Lockpick mean that the user is free to dispose of the purchased console and games in any way for personal purposes, not related to the distribution of games to third parties. For example, the received keys can be used when running in the emulator, to install additional programs on your set-top box, or to experiment with debugging utilities such as hactool, LibHac and ChoiDujour.
Nintendo claims that the use of Lockpick allows users to bypass video game protections and gain unauthorized access to all cryptographic keys stored in the Console TPM, and the resulting keys can be used to violate manufacturers' copyrights and run pirated copies of games on third-party devices without Console TPM or on systems with Console TPM disabled. It is assumed that the last straw was the appearance on May XNUMX in pirated access to the game "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom", which became available for launch in emulators two weeks before the upcoming official release for the game console.
Meanwhile, the developers of the Skyline Emulator, which allows you to run games from Nintendo Switch on Android devices, have announced a decision to stop development of their project, fearing accusations of infringing Nintendo's intellectual property, as the emulator requires encryption keys obtained using the Lockpick utility to run. .
Source: opennet.ru