Decryption Help

[puggsoy]

I am here to ask how to even start. I see people taking audio files from really any game, with the most unknown file type possible, but turn it into a wav or whatever. My question is, how do they do it? I know they use mostly Hex Editors and what not to remove the encryption, but how?

I actually feel like this clearly shows what he wants to learn. He wants to know how people manage to extract files from ranges of platforms, in general, not a specific game in particular. Yes, it's a very broad question, but not unclear.

Unfortunately, this is a very complex topic. It's not a 1-2-3 step process or something you can write a tutorial for. It's a bit like art. You can follow steps for drawing a specific picture, but there's no tutorial for "getting good at art".

Doing this requires knowledge about how files work, i.e. the fact that they are made out of bytes and and how these bytes are read by programs. Decrypting, decompression, and extraction are all separate things that you also need to understand and be able to identify. The process of doing this yourself is something that simply takes, practice, experience, and persistence. You learn how it works from existing algorithms and programs, and just try and apply the general rules.

Honestly, this is just a very very brief summary. This is stuff that people go to university for (although that's not strictly necessary, what with the internet ), and it's pretty much impossible to get your head around this stuff (let alone make programs for it) if you're not very experienced with programming. Encryption and compression algorithms are made by professional developers, and reverse engineering them isn't a walk in the park.

I've been programming for a number of years and finished my first year studying software engineering in 2015; I have yet to reverse engineer any encryption or compression. I've only ever coded one or two decompressions using existing information that others researched, and I can only recognise a handful of them. Most of my programs are just extractors or converters, either for decompressed files or those which I can decompress using existing code/tools.

So yeah, cryptography is a whole area of computer science that you will need to thoroughly study, understand, and have experience with before you can effectively reverse-engineering this sort of stuff. It will take time and effort, a lot of both. This is why there are still a heap of file types that haven't been cracked; it's hard.