I came upon this in Civ5’s files:

[elnixon]

I was looking through some of them, with no particular intent in mind, and found this in installscript.vdf:

"kvsignatures"
{
"InstallScript" "224eaa6c8c96aef9ee8bc4f07953aaf2608ea725e74eb81f6a8571ec424f26aaaa134bfa3f20de73b8572515e4a897b969cec0a1407291f6ec3e2a58612911140129fb96ced46c10c696cf48593649af530a0bc150c8493f89fa390e43e39c26f7d6c97cbd2829b545208b21fcbc1f9e5693d1259890775039216f644431c844”
}

I imagine it is key signatures, but why would the game designers make their main defense against piracy so easily bypassable? There’s probably something preventing you from registering an account with this, right?

 

[3335d]

Is there a way to input this into Steam and get CiV? I'm not one to pirate games, but someone *has* to resolve this issue. Any individual can now install CiV without limit AND make it work with Steam.

 

[Gedemon]

Is there a way to input this into Steam and get CiV?

None that I'm aware of.

I've got the same file with "InstallScript" key for my other steam games, so that's not unusual.

 

[trystero49]

That has 256 characters (not including spaces, I assume those aren't actually part of the script, just a weird consequence of copy pasting on forum), which means that that code is very likely a SHA-256 hash. What does that mean? It means that in 10 or 15 years, when computers become much better and/or quantum computers are invented, you will be able to obtain a string that hashes into that value, which may or may not be a valid Steam Key. Technically, there are an infinite number of strings that will hash into that value, and if Valve is salting their hashes (which they should), you are still no better off unless you know the salt.

 

[3335d]

Quantum computers already exist, they're just not widely deployed and the most they can do is 3*5 = 15.

 

[trystero49]

Then for our purposes, they do not exist. In any case, that string is probably totally useless to everyone except Valve.