The Assassin's Creed 2 activation key generator saga serves as a cautionary tale for gamers and developers alike. While generator creators may initially succeed in bypassing security measures, the ongoing battle between pirates and developers often results in a losing proposition for the former. Patches and updates can, and frequently do, render generated keys useless, leaving users without access to the game.
released a crack that completely removed the DRM requirements rather than just emulating them. This "patched" the game's executable to ignore the server check entirely. Ubisoft’s Retreat:
You are not outsmarting Ubisoft. You are outsmarting yourself. The time you spend navigating dead links and disabling your antivirus to run a keygen could be spent actually playing the game—a game that is currently on sale for the price of a fast-food sandwich.
However, I want to clarify that I couldn't find any specific academic paper or article with this exact title. It's possible that the paper you're thinking of might be a blog post, a forum discussion, or a technical write-up.