TAGES

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TAGES
Developed by TAGES SA
Latest release 5.5.2.8 / 2007
OS Microsoft Windows
Genre Digital Rights Management
License Proprietary
Website http://www.tagesprotection.com

TAGES (Tagès) is a software Copy Protection brand, jointly developed, at first, by MPO and the Thales Group (formerly known as Thomson-CSF). The work on the protection began in 1999.

The name 'Tages' originates in the Etruscan mythology, where it functions as the Latin spelling for an alias of a minor deity, Tarchies.

The first software product to be protected by TAGES was a PC game, MotoRacer 3, developed by Delphine Software (DSI) and released in 2001. This marked the first sale and licensing of the TAGES copy protection system.

In 2003, an independent company, TAGES SA, was formed. The company focuses on the development of Copy Protection and Digital Rights Management systems, and is now the sole vendor of the TAGES copy protection system.

The TAGES copy protection system is compatible with multiple versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system, and is employed on CD and DVD discs. One of the main strengths of TAGES resides in the incorporation of a "Secure Area" on a physical medium, which renders the production of a relatively perfect copy of a TAGES protected disc, utilizing modern hardware, a nearly impossible task. Additionally, a set of anti-cracking instruments is being provided with the protection system (such as TAGESCAP, TAGES APIs and TAGES VFS); this makes the reverse-engineering of TAGES-protected applications a difficult and time-consuming task.

Contents

[edit] Protection strategies

As previously mentioned in this article, TAGES employs several techniques in order to counter software piracy. These techniques span over three main areas of interest (due to which reason, TAGES SA often describes its product as "The AAA Copy Protection System"):

[edit] Defense against the circumvention of the protection by means of reverse-engineering

TAGES offers various strategies designated to resist the reverse-engineering and cracking of TAGES-protected software, among which are:

  • TAGESCAP - A binary wrapper which is applied to the software application's executable file and requires no changes to the source code of the application. It provides the encryption of the protected product's executable file(s), and the protection of the application against debugging, disassembly, reverse-engineering, and other forms of analysis. The TAGESCAP strategy suits a situation which the personnel in charge of safeguarding the software product against piracy has no access to the software's source code, or where the developer is not interested in introducing any protection-related changes to the software's source code. TAGESCAP thus makes it possible to protect an application without making any modifications to its source code, or without even having any access to it. This, however, has the drawback of restricting the authentication procedure only to one single check, which will essentially be carried out at the start-up of the protected application.
  • TAGES APIs - A set of instruments allowing the developer to work seamlessly with the Secure Area which TAGES provides; not only does it enable the storage of sensitive information (such as cryptographic keys, certificates, etc.) within the Secure Area, but it also enables the developer to implement a set of fully customized "protection triggers", potentially appearing at any stage of the protected application's execution phase. For instance, should a non-authentic copy of a protected product be detected, the developer of that software product can decide upon the actions to be taken under such circumstances, such as electing to silently degrade some aspects of the product's functionality. This scenario is evident in an hypothetical example in which, should a protected computer car racing game detect a piracy attempt, it will begin to gradually drop the speed of the driven vehicle, and degrade its responsiveness to the player's actions. The player could then be invited to purchase a licensed version of the game, and play it without encountering such premeditated anomalies. Notably, a developer could specify that an explicitly restricted version of the protected application (such as a demo version) would be launched, should the carrier be identified as counterfeit. The TAGES APIs feature, however, requires modifications and additions to the source code of the to-be protected application.
  • TAGES VFS - An encrypted virtual file system, allowing the developer to additionally encrypt selected non-executable content which is of an association to the to-be protected software. When a successfully authenticated protected application runs, it has transparent access to the original (decrypted, plain-text) content; this functionality is achieved by means of a device driver. Should a protected application's authentication phase be successfully removed by means of deliberate circumvention, the application's erroneous behaviour is to be expected, that is due to the fact that the encrypted content is not being accessible to the application in its preliminary plain-text form, and from the running application's perspective, it is being naturally considered as an unexpected garbage data - resulting, in most cases, in a protected application's crash.

TAGES permits the combination of the aforementioned strategies for a given project, in order to further increase the strength and security of the protection being applied.

As of mid-2007 and up until the time of this writing (November, 2007), a popular practice has been to combine the TAGES protection system with the SolidShield protection system, as evident from a plethora of recent TAGES-protected applications. Namely, SolidShield joined by the TAGES APIs is a very common configuration, as usually one can not apply two executable wrappers (That is to say, both SolidShield and TAGESCAP) on the same executable file.

[edit] Device drivers and stability

As with most optical disc-based copy protection systems (such as SafeDisc, StarForce, etc.), TAGES installs its own device drivers as a part of the copy protection system. The TAGES device drivers are installed on the first launch of any TAGES-protected application.

[edit] Uninstallation of the TAGES device drivers

TAGES SA provides an official, standalone, device driver installation and uninstallation program [1]. This program functions as a toggle; once the TAGES device drivers are installed, the program will function as an uninstaller, otherwise, it will function as an installer. Both 32bit and 64bit versions of the program are available.

[edit] Stability of the TAGES device drivers

With respect to stability, there is not much evidence of any significant trouble arising from the deployment of the TAGES device drivers on a given PC. However, there is one known case in which an update was produced by TAGES SA, to address conflicts with some unorthodox software products, as reported by some players of a TAGES-protected PC game, Darkstar One, in its English version. [2]

[edit] Known problems

Blue Byte's The Settlers: Rise of an Empire, published by Ubisoft, uses TAGES. Users on the Ubisoft forums have reported problems getting the DVD version to work, as many people get a message instructing them to insert the DVD into the drive, when the DVD is in the drive. Various proposed remedies only work for some users.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links and references