Yuzu (Nintendo Switch emulator)
Yuzu, stylised as yuzu, is a Nintendo Switch emulator. Its claim to fame includes being lead by the same staff and developers that manufactured the flagship Nintendo 3DS emulator, Citra. During the 3DS's lifecycle, Citra was held to high regards by the 3DS emulation community.
Launching in 2018, only a year after the Nintendo Switch's release in March 2017, yuzu has been met with controversy, primarily stemming from its availability for a highly recent console, as well as being financially supported via a paid donation system for early-access builds and prioritised support.
Fast forward to 2024, and you'll see yuzu as tremendously capable emulation software, running a large amount of Switch software as well as or better than a real Nintendo Switch console. yuzu is available for PC, Mac, Linux, and Android.
Preliminary
As seen in Why The Switch Still Excites, Nintendo's role in the industry creates a unique position for creating an ecosystem for developers to create and publish video games on the Nintendo Switch. Part of this responsibility includes ensuring that third-party developers can trust Nintendo's platform to uphold the developer's copyright, by ensuring that theft of their intellectual property does not occur.
From the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, Nintendo can be seen as the sole saviour of the video game market, previously rife with bootlegged software distribution and lackluster financial security. By moderating the ecosystem and enabling a common ground for consumers to play their games, eliminating the necessity for proprietary hardware for individual games, and implementing technological protection measures to prevent intellectual property theft, developers flocked to Nintendo as a video game platform and publisher. Nintendo solely decides which games are playable on their console via a series of hardware and software protections, protecting developers from the copying and distribution of bootlegged software - unlike any console that came before it. Nintendo originated as a playing card company from the 1800s, but video games are their legacy, especially ensuring their success as a company in the later years of its formation. Nintendo's success is a direct result of combating software pirates, and it should come as no surprise that Nintendo wants to protect itself from the consequences that led to the market original demise.
Games released and published by Nintendo currently are protected with numerous copyright protection measures to this day. The Nintendo Switch's operating, Horizon, is an example of flagship security-grade software, and Nintendo's most expansive and technically complicated OS. For example, to date, Horizon publicly has zero exploitable software vulnerabilities that enable high-severity attacks, such as kernel or TrustZone takeover, both of which can lead to the possibility of software piracy. Nintendo does invest in the security of its platform, and is widely known to use its position in the industry to deter and set examples for those who threaten it.
However, in early 2018, a bootROM exploit for NVIDIA's Tegra X1 APU, known as CVE-2018-6242 (fusee-gelee), was documented and disclosed to NVIDIA, before later being disclosed to the public. As this particular APU is not only used in the Nintendo Switch, but devices such as the Google Pixel C tablet and Nvidia Drive autonomous driving framework, it was necessary to inform NVIDIA of the exploit before the general public to prevent malpractice, which could have dire implications. Because a bootROM runs before any piece of Nintendo's code, exploits within it bypass a vast majority of Nintendo's hardware security measures that protect the Nintendo Switch and its software. Fusee-gelee was a monumental discovery for reverse-engineering and documenting the Nintendo Switch.
This allowed further and widespread documentation of the Nintendo Switch, especially useful for emulator development. As it bypasses nearly all of Nintendo's security measures, its existence allows exploiters to obtain copies of their Nintendo Switch console's encryption keys, which are unique to every console, before access to those keys are revoked by the operating system. These keys are used in conjunction with others to descramble internal system data, as well as Nintendo's game data.
End-users can take advantage of this bootROM exploit to dump (copy) data from their Nintendo Switch, which (when used in conjunction with an emulator, like yuzu) allows the user to run copies of Nintendo Switch software without using a Nintendo Switch.
Litigation
In February 2024, Nintendo filed a suit against the company that develops yuzu, Tropic Haze. The suit details and cites violations of Nintendo's copy-rights, as well as seeking damages from the theoretical harm caused by the existence of yuzu.
A full overview of the litigation documents can be found here.
The rest of this page will have my opinions on each page. I am not a lawyer, and I do not have internal information to either Nintendo or the yuzu team.
- I never knew the yuzu development team was operating under an LLC named Tropic Haze. I wonder if this is a reference to the Citrus codename of the 3DS, where they derived Citra's name from. It's awfully annoying how Nintendo assets what is lawful and unlawful; in litigation, that's not up for the defendants nor plaintiffs to assert.
- It's a bit fun to see Nintendo refer to the encryption key dump with the community name prod.keys. Is this name used by Nintendo proper, in-house, or are they not disclosing the key compilation's official name?
- Nintendo doesn't cite where Bunnei, yuzu's lead developer, asserts that "most" users pirate encryption keys. There is a screenshot later on where they acknowledge that users may do so, but it has no mention on the quantity. In addition, it is odd that Nintendo is choosing to hold yuzu directly responsible for the actions of its users, despite efforts being put in place to prevent piracy on yuzu's end. To this day, even after litigation, yuzu upholds an anti-piracy stance and enforces it strictly and swiftly.
- Nintendo's lawyers are seemingly focussing on the encryption keys more than the emulator itself. A few months ago, Lockpick, software monumental to decrypting data from a Nintendo Switch, was recently eliminated from GitHub following a DMCA takedown request from Nintendo. Why is this necessarily related to yuzu itself? Nintendo cites section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an act that protects copyright holders from tampering and unauthorised access to copyrighted works as a result of tampering with copyright protection measures. This section is not necessarily limited to audiovisual works, instead acting as a barrier to reverse engineering as a whole for any embedded device protected by copyright, such as the Nintendo Switch itself. The legality of reverse engineering has implications on sectors wildly outside the scope of a video game emulator, and is often associated with Right to Repair as well; RE work customarily needs to be done to ensure compatibility with repair parts that aren't distributed or manufactured by the OEM. Any kind of ruling or precedent based on Nintendo's claims here will be monumental for many sectors of my personal life.
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