Saturn Protection

[Amon]

PsyMan asked me to make this thread to gather all the known facts about how the Saturn protection works in one place. So what do we know?

Feel free to post if you have any information on the subject.

If you are uncertain about some piece of information make it clear (last thing we want is to mix facts and assumptions together).

 

[ExCyber]

The signature that the CD block looks for is stored in the outer "ring", and embodies part of the graphical content of the ring; however, it is known that most of the ring data is ignored by the Saturn*. The graphical content of the ring is formed as patterns in the CD channel data and is read as such, by exploiting the fact that the Yellow Book / ECMA-130 "scrambling" algorithm is deterministic and constructing the input data to deliberately produce runs of long and short pits after EFM encoding.



*: Actually, it appears likely that the Saturn is not even looking for an exact match. It might accept "fuzzy" matches for reliability reasons; runs of long/short pits can be difficult for CD readers to track.

 

[Amon]

PsyMan, I asked CyberWarriorX here is what he had to say and I quote

That's what the wiki is for