The UE engine's strengths lie in its powerful graphics and visual effects, which align well with the current gaming market's demand for high-quality, premium content. However, the UE engine also faces security issues, especially as there are already many hacking tools targeting the UE engine on the market.
In games developed with the UE engine, the code is compiled into executable files (such as .exe) and dynamic link libraries (.dll) and stored in the Binaries directory, while game resources (such as models, textures, audio, etc.) are usually stored in formats such as .uasset, .uexp, and .umap.
Using the UE resource extraction tool UnrealPakViewer, you can analyse the game's pak files and extract resources such as code, images, and videos. The emergence of such tools has greatly lowered the threshold for cheats and hacks.
UnrealPakViewer can analyse and view various types of resources and code
As an important asset of a game, once game resources are leaked, it may cause a series of problems such as plagiarism by competing products, damage to intellectual property rights, spoilers of game content, and tampering with game resources to produce and sell cheats.
How to effectively encrypt UE engine resources, raise the threshold for hacking, and protect game resources has become a must for game manufacturers. To strengthen the UE engine, there are two major challenges that need to be solved:
◆ Compatibility issues: UE4 and UE5 have many minor versions, and different versions vary in performance, technology, and experience. Will the game encryption solution be compatible?
◆ Balancing encryption strength and performance consumption: If encryption alone affects game performance and causes problems with game smoothness, it will be unacceptable to both game manufacturers and players.
In response to the above issues, JikGuard has developed a set of encryption protection solutions for the UE engine:
This solution is fully compatible with all versions of UE4/UE5. It also features a carefully constructed algorithm that balances encryption strength and performance consumption, ensuring high encryption strength while minimising performance consumption. This solution also has the following features:
◆ Fast and imperceptible
The encryption solution only encrypts key core locations, with virtually no impact on game loading speed or running process, making it imperceptible.
◆ High encryption strength
The encryption and decryption algorithms are customised and obfuscated, making it impossible for hackers to analyse the algorithms. The algorithm flowchart is shown below:
JikGuard Algorithm Flowchart
◆ Fast decryption speed
Core file blocks are small and do not vary with the size of the entire resource file. When tested on mainstream mobile devices, decrypting 300 resource files at once adds less than 10ms of additional decryption time.
The encryption algorithm has undergone high-intensity custom obfuscation, carefully designed to balance complexity and efficiency, resulting in minimal runtime overhead.
◆ Anti-unpacking and anti-debugging
The JikGuard reinforcement solution can effectively prevent unpacking and debugging. After reinforcement, the package cannot be extracted or analysed, leaving no clues for hackers.
◆ Multi-end interconnection and hot update support
The JikGuard Unreal Engine encryption solution supports Android, iOS, and PC multi-platforms, as well as online hot updates for resources.
◆ Easy to use, low access cost
It is very easy to use. You can encrypt the entire game resource with just one command line.
On this basis, the JikGuard UE engine reinforcement solution also provides the following special features:
● Anti-debugging: Detects whether the game process is in a debugging state.
● Anti-frame capture: Detects whether the game process is being captured by a frame capture tool.
● Anti-injection: Detects whether the game has been injected with malicious modules.
● Anti multi-instance: Prohibits multiple instances of the game from running simultaneously.
● Anti-virtual machine: Prohibits the game from running in a virtual machine.
● Anti-malicious tools: Detects whether there are malicious tools in the game running environment.
- Unreal Engine Resource Encryption Solution
