Compared to Unity, the UE engine excels in its powerful graphics rendering and visual effects, better aligning with the current gaming market's demand for high-quality, premium titles. However, like Unity, the UE engine also faces unavoidable security challenges, with numerous resource hack tools targeting the UE engine now available on the market.
The primary code logic of UE projects resides within compiled game modules, while project resources are encapsulated in .pak resource files. These .pak files primarily contain models, textures, sounds, blueprints, maps, and other assets.
Using the UE resource extraction tool UnrealPakViewer, you can analyze UE's pak files and extract resources such as code, images, and videos. The emergence of such tools has significantly lowered the barrier for creating cheats and hacks.
After analyzing the package body, UnrealPakViewer allows you to view various resources and code.
As critical assets of a game, leaked game resources can lead to a series of issues, including plagiarism by competitors, damage to intellectual property rights, spoilers of game content, and the creation and sale of cheats through resource tampering.
How to effectively encrypt UE engine resources, raise the hack barrier, and protect game assets has become a must-master skill for game developers. To fortify the UE engine, two major challenges must be addressed:
Compatibility Issues
UE4 and UE5 have numerous minor versions, each differing in performance, technology, and experience. Can the game encryption solution achieve perfect compatibility?
Balancing Encryption Strength and Performance Overhead
Striking the right balance between these two factors remains a significant challenge. If encryption compromises game performance, leading to issues with smooth gameplay, it becomes unacceptable for both game developers and players.
To address the aforementioned issues, JikGuard has developed an encryption protection solution specifically for the UE engine:
This solution supports multiple platforms and is fully compatible with all versions of UE4/UE5. It employs a carefully engineered algorithm that balances encryption strength with performance overhead, ensuring high encryption strength while maintaining minimal performance impact.
In addition, this solution offers the following features:
◆ High Speed, Seamless Experience
The encryption scheme only processes core critical areas, having virtually no impact on game loading speed or operational flow, ensuring a seamless experience.
◆ High Encryption Strength
The encryption and decryption algorithms employ custom obfuscation techniques, preventing hackers from reverse-engineering the algorithms. The algorithm flowchart is shown below:
◆ Fast Decryption Speed
Core file blocks are compact and remain consistent regardless of the overall resource file size. When tested on mainstream smartphones, decrypting 300 resource files simultaneously adds less than 10 milliseconds to the decryption time.
The encryption algorithm employs a highly customized obfuscation technique. This obfuscation is meticulously designed to enhance complexity while maintaining efficiency, resulting in minimal operational overhead.
◆ Anti-unpacking and Anti-debugging
JikGuard's hardening solution effectively prevents unpacking and debugging. Once hardened, the package cannot be extracted, analyzed, or subjected to other malicious operations, leaving no clues for hackers.
◆ Cross-Platform Compatibility with Hotfix Support
JikGuard's Unreal Engine encryption solution supports Android, iOS, and PC platforms, enabling online hotfixes for resources.
◆ Easy to use, low implementation cost
Extremely simple to use—just run a single command line to encrypt all game resources.
