Enlarge / This is the message you can expect to get when trying to log in to Nintendo's network to play pirated software. (credit: Wololo)

When hackers revealed an unpatchable exploit allowing deep system access in all existing Switch consoles back in April, some industry watchers worried that this would lead to widespread piracy for copyrighted games on the system. Additional work by longtime Nintendo hacker SciresM, though, lays out the relatively robust protections Nintendo has in place to detect systems playing pirated games online and to permanently ban those consoles from Nintendo's network.
SciresM's lengthy Reddit post goes into a good level of technical detail on how Nintendo authorizes games and systems when connecting to the Nintendo network. The core of the protections comes from a unique encrypted client certificate stored in the "TrustZone" core of every Switch unit.
That certificate is used to identify the specific hardware being used to log in to Nintendo's servers, meaning a banned console will stay banned from the network permanently. That's a change from the 3DS, where users could use a fake token to get around a console-level network ban (at least until another ban came down, that is).

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