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There was several threads on Blizzard action agains hackers. It was said that the number of banned cheaters is 5000. And I think this might be the last moment of happines for the hackfree environment for all of you, honest ladder players. Let me explain you several facts, that you might eventually miss..
In case this violates the TL rules, any admin can feel free to close/delete this thread. Anyways, I think this might be interesting topic. You might think, that it actually advertise cheats, but truth is that it just describes how the current problematics works and how it worked in SC1. The links provided are not cheats, but in the hands of skilled programmer they might be recoded to the weapon of mass cheating, yes. Sorry in advance.. Let's go on..
You might know I fought against various dll injections in SC1, the tool PenguinPlug (later SCExtension) was fairly good and kept the PGTour and WGTour decently hackfree environment. Later on me and Ili gave up because we (WGT) had some law misunderstandings with Blizzard on the dll we provided, and their responses took ages.. And WGT died in a year or two in a same way PGT did. People just lost interest to work on it (you probably know the story).
But secretly me and one german ToT) "nottobenamed" friend - we were working on streaming the replays.. Thus we had two choices, to crack StarCraft in a way we did with Superpenguin and Ilintar, or to write our own SC1 emulator.
+ Show Spoiler +
We chose the second way, Nottobenamed friend wrote OpenGL 2D emulator, and with Taiche's map from MPQ library, with extracted pictues from SC1 we made our own StarCraft emulator, based on my SC1 knowledge. In the end it looked like better then on the picture, you could zoom the map and the new units had glowing background (OpenGL!), the screen could be like 1920x1600 big, it moved to players camera, and it had plenty other features.. And you can probably ask, why noone heard about it?
The answer is pretty easy, Rather for SC game streaming it could be used for cheating instead. So we kept it private. Noone was really interested in external game emulator in SC1 days thos we had one. Once I made the DirectX overlay based on Lasgo's BWTV DX hooks.. so you saw the cheat info right in the game and you had replaced minimap with my own.. And you could play it on ICCup. I gave the necessary info to the ICCup guys to know, that they can't do anything against it... but to improve their experience against cheating.
+ Show Spoiler +
So, when SC2 beta came out, I was evil enough to fight for the shadowwalker's glory and research code like mad to finish the maphack as first in the world. I failed. I was second. Tho permafrost's and other's way was to crack SC2 process again, I chose the way of being invisible, to read from StarCraft just like antiviruses search for malware in your PC. The information I received was displayed on another PC monitor. It took like 2 days of research from scratch. And after some time I had almost perfect external maphack, tho I missed one more information. The unit type. I could read whos unit is where, but I didn't know what it is, if marine or zergling. I gave up coding anything due to loss of interest. The result of several wasted evenings is available here:
+ Show Spoiler +
And why am I writing this text? There are other guys, that are after first banning wave very very interested to be invisible. Tho, its more like a research job at the moment, sooner or later the external emulator will be available to download. The sources (not just mine) are already published for current patch, but you must be smart enough to compile them (which is 99% barrier in most of the reader's case), however I assume that within few weeks the cheat will be on the net.
The bad guys even found the cached information from the SC2 obsmode, which is "APM, minerals per minute, camera position" information, and they can display it on other PC or directly in game without modifying it. And that's it. Without modifications to SC2 memory. If you ask what does it mean, it means that Warden won't work in general - it cannot. Not this way. Simple and easy. Yes, there might be technical argues that you can find the handle in other processes, but... if you think twice.. Blizzard cannot do that because of thousand reasons.
In SC1 times I you could read that you cannot win the war against hackers&cheaters. Its right, you can't. If you think you can, you are fools. And now, the bad guys got really good idea how to cheat. And sadly, they are very very interested in this external method, and a lot of them are working on it. And they will do it, they are good, damn good in finding what they need in SC2 memory structures. And they won't get caught.
I told Blizzard guys during beta, that the current way is hacker friendly. For sure they knew it is, but you know... The anticheat dept. cannot do a thing, its that way coz of performance issues, its ment to be that way, because you game will work fluently... and they won't change it. And I really doubt there will be serious changes in the game engine in the upcoming expansion(s). It's kinda sad, that the bad guys found what we knew we can't fight severals years back in times when we were coding PP anticheat.
Just in case you are interested in the source codes, feel free to PM me I will guide you.
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Good read, saddening that like you said warden(and in turn blizzard) will be severely limited in the ways of detecting stuff like this. Like you said if someone is determined enough, it's only a matter of time.
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You'd think a fairly large software company like Blizzard would be like Microsoft and hire hackers like yourself to work for them so they can plug security holes. Thanks for the read.
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I guess everybody in their right mind knew that Warden wouldn't save battle.net from hackers. It was bound to happen.
What I'd like to know is: Would it be possible to detect this kind of hack with an anti-cheating tool? Of course you'd have to have dedicated programmers to have it, but is it possible that we'll have a hack-free competitive environment in sc2 thanks to community effort like with iccup etc?
I sure hope so...
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I r sad face nao. Thanks for the read anyway! It's probably going to be a waste of my mental capacity to hope such things won't reach SEA.
User was warned for this post
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Nothing is perfect, tbh i rather have blizzard spend time on balancing and making the game better in general then worry about hackers to much. There will always be hackers as long as there are online games.. I played years of counter strike and that was a hack fest as well. Those few games I lose because of a hacker really won't spoil the fun i have with starcraft. And let's be honest , most kids that do use hacks won't take it serious and stop playing rather fast and in most cases they just suck so you can beat them anyway 
Just my 2 cents, fun read though ^^
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On October 04 2010 21:32 Coufu wrote:
You'd think a fairly large software company like Blizzard would be like Microsoft and hire hackers like yourself to work for them so they can plug security holes. Thanks for the read.
The issue is that, the only ways to detect something like this, would probably also be illegal. Blizzard can, as far as I understand, only monitor the server traffic, code changes within their game files and -folders, as well as any program that interferes with them.
I am no expert, though, but that's an explanation I heard when playing WoW.
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On October 04 2010 21:32 Coufu wrote:
You'd think a fairly large software company like Blizzard would be like Microsoft and hire hackers like yourself to work for them so they can plug security holes. Thanks for the read.
It's not that simple. Only solution would be not sending any information that is covered by fog data. That is not possible like in a game like SC2 because of abilities like scanner sweep and general massive unit movement that uncovers fog of war. Complain about Lag > Complain about hackers^1000
On October 04 2010 21:39 Amadi wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2010 21:32 Coufu wrote:
You'd think a fairly large software company like Blizzard would be like Microsoft and hire hackers like yourself to work for them so they can plug security holes. Thanks for the read. The issue is that, the only ways to detect something like this, would probably also be illegal. Blizzard can, as far as I understand, only monitor the server traffic, code changes within their game files and -folders, as well as any program that interferes with them. I am no expert, though, but that's an explanation I heard when playing WoW.
No MMORPG companies do this all the time. Protecting themselves from being hacked by not allowing a program to run is perfectly legal if it's stated in ToS. It's just that it's futile (and I mean FUTILE) since a bypass can easily be made.
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Wouldn't another solution be to heavily encrypt everything? I mean, a hacker could get at it if he wanted, it would just take a long time. So long that the info would no longer be relevant.
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Ashur never cease to amaze when it comes to stuff like this, seriously.
Interesting read.
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
Informative read Ashur, nice to see you post again despite the depressing message it sends
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On October 04 2010 21:43 TedJustice wrote:
Wouldn't another solution be to heavily encrypt everything? I mean, a hacker could get at it if he wanted, it would just take a long time. So long that the info would no longer be relevant.
that's why people make programs. So you only have to decrypt it once.
Even if a random encryption was created every time a new game loads. This doesn't work because a hacker will just look at the memory and look at what the random encyption value (or a value that triggers a certain decryption function) and decrypt it.
Back to square one of having server sided fog of war.
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Firstly I am a programmer.
The bad guys even found the cached information from the SC2 obsmode, which is "APM, minerals per minute, camera position" information, and they can display it on other PC or directly in game without modifying it. And that's it. Without modifications to SC2 memory. Getting APM and all the other info was possible/found out months after the beta.
Without modifications to SC2 memory? What?
Also what source-codes are you referring too.
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""And WGT died in a year or two in a same way PGT did. People just lost interest to work on it (you probably know the story)."""
Being one of the head admin to PGTour this was not the case. PGTour had just received a brand new face lift and during the process the code that he used in the forums was open source. The people that created the code left a backdoor which they used to exploit and gain access to the website thereby destroying it. Pat was so devastated by the event that he literally disappeared (He never got the chance to backup the new changes so he lost everything). Chr1s and myself tried calling him repeatedly but he disappeared. Most of this information was never completely revealed to the public because Chr1s posed as Pat for a few more weeks hoping he would come back.
On topic though, I really dislike cheating. It ruins the game for everyone else. A display of production queue, or income tab is just as bad if not worse than a maphack. I wish blizzard would put forth the effort into fixing these possible future issues.
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On October 04 2010 21:53 cocosoft wrote:
Also what source-codes are you referring too.
PM if you want them, i won't spread cheats all over this splace.
And I am refering to this:
+ Show Spoiler +number of workers alive 0x3A0
mineral income 0x4E0
gas income 0x4E8
army mineral worth 0x748
army gas worth 0x768 + to the player structure offset in SC2 memory, its all ReadProcessMemory stuff, including minimap and unit IDS.. Means some other PC can warn you that enemy is 6pooling, 9pooling or smth else by sound..
On October 04 2010 22:00 Sanasante wrote:
""And WGT died in a year or two in a same way PGT did. People just lost interest to work on it (you probably know the story)."""
Sure there are differences, the meaning was that they ended coz people didn't work on them. First WGT had the partnership issue which was about that Blizzard didn't respond fast and in case of PGT it was that Pat didn't respond at all. And people that were willing to work lost interest/chance. Hope its clear now.
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nice information, you mind reposting this 1min youtube vid ?
i get the error message that because of violation with sony ( music may be) this video cant be showed in my country.
and i got another question, what do you think must be done to at least try to prevent cheating in the current way you described ?
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an encrypted protocol with changed encryption once in a while will make maphackers life hard. He would need to update his hack software with each patch and the programmers doing those programs would have to constantly update their software ..
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+ Show Spoiler +
It's kind of sad to see hax, though 
I can only hope hackers face a permanent ban :>
But hey, people cheat in all games... Even professional sports.
It would be hard to do it at an actual tournament, but in online-only tournaments, this is a real issue.
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Is this how those Immortals were being warped in too?
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On October 04 2010 22:05 Special Endrey wrote:
and i got another question, what do you think must be done to at least try to prevent cheating in the current way you described ?
You can't do anything automatic.
On October 04 2010 22:20 Soclever wrote:
Is this how those Immortals were being warped in too?
No.
On October 04 2010 22:10 Schnullerbacke13 wrote:
an encrypted protocol with changed encryption once in a while will make maphackers life hard. He would need to update his hack software with each patch and the programmers doing those programs would have to constantly update their software ..
Its not about network protocol, its reading game memory.
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So, If blizz wont stop this type of unwanted data access to the information about games currently being played that could you do the impossible?
Give the world the SC2TV they have always wanted?
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+ Show Spoiler +Jinro has a banhammer 3000 instead, comic done by mrhoon felt like posting this comic due to thread name ^^
Props to you sir, its people like you that keep our game fair for everyone
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Well the obvious solution is to have the servers only give data to the client that the client is supposed to know. Basically what HoN does. Of course Blizz wasn't that smart.
HoN > SC2 in basically every possible way minus being SC.
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Very true Ashur. I loved the work you and Ili put into the PP back on WGT/PGT, and we definitely appreciated your assistance at the time. Is Blizzards response time similar now as it was back when we tried to get a decent ladder established? (utter failure thx to blizz)
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On October 04 2010 22:34 Amber[LighT] wrote:
Very true Ashur. I loved the work you and Ili put into the PP back on WGT/PGT, and we definitely appreciated your assistance at the time. Is Blizzards response time similar now as it was back when we tried to get a decent ladder established? (utter failure thx to blizz)
Dunno, I talked to them durning first patches in beta, and they told me that they can't do anything about it... and... then... well... we had several whiskey doubles with Ili this weekend in Warsaw :D
Ili, old boy... we are so screwed up with the cheater hunting, you know..
Uhm... ye,... sad... lets go for another glass..
But, I can ask them again.
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Do you think they could make it less hacker friendly the way it is now? Or would they need a complete overhaul? Also, did you send your stuff to Blizzard showing what you can do? I wonder if they'd thank you or just ignore you.
Interesting read, tnx!
edit: I see you pretty much answered my questions while I was typing it
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If the game would be run on blizzard hosts, all these hacks would not be possible provided they feed the client running on the players PC only the data he knows of and no additional information. Blizzard does that already with WoW but then again maybe it is too expensive for a game without monthly subscription.
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This is a problem in every MP-game where things are calculated client-side instead of server-side. The downside is that you can, in theory and if you know what you are doing, create a 3rd-party app that reads that information and display it to the user just like you described without actually modyfying SC2.
The upside is that giving the client only the information the player is supposed to have puts a huge stress on bandwidth and servers, making it inpractical for a game with so many variables as SC2. At least that is how i understand it.
However, maphacking is not that hard to spot if you watch replays, with this feature added players can police thier own matchhistory and report suspicious matches to Blizz for review.
Cheaters cheat, just gotta learn to live with it and roll with the punches i guess.
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On October 04 2010 22:30 Floophead_III wrote:
Well the obvious solution is to have the servers only give data to the client that the client is supposed to know. Basically what HoN does. Of course Blizz wasn't that smart.
HoN > SC2 in basically every possible way minus being SC.
IIRC, the problem is the number of units involved. For all I know, HoN doesn't allow you to reveal a few hundreds units by simply clicking a button the way a scanner sweep does it. If the data was sent to the client only then, you'd probably have lag. Lots of it.
However I'm not sure all clients need to have the observer info, like income and production. But without it, generating the replays would probably be a nightmare.
Not such a simple problem, sadly.
EDIT:
However, maphacking is not that hard to spot if you watch replays, with this feature added players can police thier own matchhistory and report suspicious matches to Blizz for review.
From what I read, some maphacks allow you to mask your true camera position. According to the OP, you could have a 3rd party program just reading the information and displaying it to you via an overlay, or with sounds, or even a 2nd monitor.
That program is impressing Ashur. And scary at the same time.
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They won vs MDY industries (MMOglider). Well, it's been down for more than a year now. Taking the big guys is all blizzard can do I suppose, the 'bad guys' will always be one step ahead, and they can never take on the private ones.
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All we can do is raise the barrier for those without in-depth knowledge about exploiting and programming to prevent them from using an actual hack. Those who are desperate to hack will do so and will find a way, sadly, but true.
But I think a hack in a shooter (aka wallhack and aimbot) are more of a threat than a maphack in Starcraft. Still it is annoying as hell, though, unless the hacker found some time to learn how to play, it wont help him as much as a hack in a shooter would do.
I hope we still have some progress regarding anti-cheat from both sides, the community and Blizzard. Thanks Ashur for the read!
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Wouldn't address space layout randomisation at least make this kind of thing a bit harder? I'm not really an expert on it, and I can see how maybe with massive knowledge of the game you could follow a chain of pointers to always find the appropriate data, but I don't know, is it even feasible to know that much? I'm guessing the current generation just works by knowing where to look in advance?
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On October 04 2010 23:08 Klumaster wrote:
Wouldn't address space layout randomisation at least make this kind of thing a bit harder? I'm not really an expert on it, and I can see how maybe with massive knowledge of the game you could follow a chain of pointers to always find the appropriate data, but I don't know, is it even feasible to know that much? I'm guessing the current generation just works by knowing where to look in advance?
Randomization? Like to find pointer(s) to randomized data? The game needs to know where it is. And if game knows, hacker knows.
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I think warden can still detect this type of cheats. It doesn't just check if something is messing with the SC2 memory, it checks all the other processes on your computer. Thats why it was a big deal back in the wow alpha, then in beta they updated the TOS saying that you are giving them permission to scan everything running on your computer. Warden from what I understand is more or less an anti-virus program, only it is updated with hack definitions instead of virus definitions.
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really good read, I had no idea hacking was such an issue, I thought it was just something silver leaguers complained about before qqing
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What should have been done to stop this, does it require most things processed server side and the clients only get information on a need to know basis?
I am a programmer (web though) so I am intrigued on what method should be used to counteract this kind of stuff
Thanks.
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On October 04 2010 23:31 rastaban wrote:
What should have been done to stop this.. so I am intrigued on what method should be used to counteract this kind of stuff
Well, you can join us and start drinking whiskey. That is all we can do about it :D
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Calgary25981 Posts
Wait, why are you allowed to post here still?
I've always thought it was a sad story that you went from coding tools the entire SC community used to coding SC hacks.
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Guess there isn't really a solution for it, because Blizzard's options are not really feasible, huh? I'm not a programmer though, but that's what you're suggesting, right?
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On October 04 2010 22:57 GoDannY wrote:
All we can do is raise the barrier for those without in-depth knowledge about exploiting and programming to prevent them from using an actual hack. Those who are desperate to hack will do so and will find a way, sadly, but true.
But I think a hack in a shooter (aka wallhack and aimbot) are more of a threat than a maphack in Starcraft. Still it is annoying as hell, though, unless the hacker found some time to learn how to play, it wont help him as much as a hack in a shooter would do.
I hope we still have some progress regarding anti-cheat from both sides, the community and Blizzard. Thanks Ashur for the read!
this isn't necessarily true, in warcraft 3 towards the ends of it life (close to when sc2 came out) there was a hack that pretty much did it all. Complete map vision (thats a given) but it also could result in buildings that were invincible (so you could literally never lose, you would lose all your units but your buildings coudlnt be targeted so it woudl come down to which person would be willing to stay in game longer for a win), and a "micro" portion of it, which meant all you had to do was attack move into a base, and when your units reached 100ish health (this was low in wc3 for those that didnt play it) they would automatically be sent back to your base, without you having to touch them
this hack raged on for months without any type of intervention from Blizzard, but we all just assumed it was due to them putting so much work into sc2.... i hope that if anyhting serious occurs at sc2 they will be able to fix it much faster
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On October 04 2010 23:36 Chill wrote:
Wait, why are you allowed to post here still?
I've always thought it was a sad story that you went from coding tools the entire SC community used to coding SC hacks.
If what he says is true then releasing his own source wont make a difference.The hacks will be released eventually and blizzard will have to make a move. I'm confident they won't sit still, hopefully this thread and info will get them moving a little faster.
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On October 04 2010 23:13 Ashur wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2010 23:08 Klumaster wrote:
Wouldn't address space layout randomisation at least make this kind of thing a bit harder? I'm not really an expert on it, and I can see how maybe with massive knowledge of the game you could follow a chain of pointers to always find the appropriate data, but I don't know, is it even feasible to know that much? I'm guessing the current generation just works by knowing where to look in advance? Randomization? Like to find pointer(s) to randomized data? The game needs to know where it is. And if game knows, hacker knows.
Don't worry, I'm not completely stupid. What I mean is that a hacker currently might not need to know the entire structure of the program - if unit info always gets stored in the same place, or pointers to it always get stored in the same place, that's all the hack needs to read. With more randomisation, surely you'd need a much more in-depth knowledge of the game, because you'd have to work out where the game's core had been allocated, then work your way down the whole hierarchy. Or I suppose some sort of pattern-matching could find it? I don't know, it's not exactly my area.
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On October 04 2010 23:36 Chill wrote:
Wait, why are you allowed to post here still?
I've always thought it was a sad story that you went from coding tools the entire SC community used to coding SC hacks.
Can you post more on this? From the sounds of it he accidentally make a program for BW that could be interpreted as a hack so he didn't release it, and for SC2 he tried making an undetectable hack (possibly to prove a point to blizzard?)
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Wait a second! So making a maphack to SC2 and bragging about it here is perfectly fine. Biggest community site of the game.
I wasn't around in SC1 so this was kind of a surprise.
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On October 04 2010 22:53 228zip wrote:
IIRC, the problem is the number of units involved. For all I know, HoN doesn't allow you to reveal a few hundreds units by simply clicking a button the way a scanner sweep does it. If the data was sent to the client only then, you'd probably have lag. Lots of it.
However I'm not sure all clients need to have the observer info, like income and production. But without it, generating the replays would probably be a nightmare.
Not such a simple problem, sadly.
I have seen this thrown around a few times and I just don't believe it. Some things to note:
-It's not much data. It's just unit type, position and maybe upgrades (although this can be optimized). It is literally maybe a couple of bytes per unit. How many units are going to be revealed at once? Not a whole lot...
-If there is lag for scanner sweep they can make it part of the gameplay mechanic (sweep has a .5 sec delay or something)
-Currently the client is getting data have hundreds of units on the entire map moving around, so it's pretty much the same amount of data (or less) than if someone did a scanner sweep and had to get all the data at once.
-Additionally, there will be less data coming down overall because the client is no longer getting data about the WHOLE map just sections of the map.
It is more complicated to do things this way, but I think it is definitely solvable. I don't think network latency should be an issue here. It's just laziness on Blizzard's part.
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The solution lies in social engineering. We can count on legit players to report hackers if they are being too obvious about it.
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On October 05 2010 00:52 MuadDib wrote:
-Currently the client is getting data have hundreds of units on the entire map moving around, so it's pretty much the same amount of data (or less) than if someone did a scanner sweep and had to get all the data at once.
-Additionally, there will be less data coming down overall because the client is no longer getting data about the WHOLE map just sections of the map.
I think the idea currently is that it uses deterministic/lockstep simulation - the units are 100% predictable so they don't need to transmit any state. Instead you just transmit orders given by the players.
One problem you'd have with "hidden units not transmitted" system is that if a hacked client did manage to bypass Warden, you could (for instance) not actually build anything for the first five minutes, scout their base, and instantly spawn a believable counter anywhere in their fog of war. You could even spawn impossible armies so long as they they weren't so ridiculous that the opponent would realize. Not to mention no one would be able to watch replays.
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On October 05 2010 01:11 Klumaster wrote:
I think the idea currently is that it uses deterministic/lockstep simulation - the units are 100% predictable so they don't need to transmit any state. Instead you just transmit orders given by the players.
One problem you'd have with "hidden units not transmitted" system is that if a hacked client did manage to bypass Warden, you could (for instance) not actually build anything for the first five minutes, scout their base, and instantly spawn a believable counter anywhere in their fog of war. You could even spawn impossible armies so long as they they weren't so ridiculous that the opponent would realize. Not to mention no one would be able to watch replays.
Hmm, yeah I guess that makes things more complicated. I guess if the clients transmitted orders to the server it might be easier, but that is a lot more server load and perhaps lag issues.
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On October 05 2010 00:37 Siwa wrote:
Wait a second! So making a maphack to SC2 and bragging about it here is perfectly fine. Biggest community site of the game.
I wasn't around in SC1 so this was kind of a surprise.
Only if you're Ashur.
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On October 05 2010 01:09 Tdelamay wrote:
The solution lies in social engineering. We can count on legit players to report hackers if they are being too obvious about it.
Not if the hacks are technically undetectable. Smart maphackers can't be detected by watching a replay. Also many people get lucky once in a while and it sucks when someone call you hacker when you just got a lucky bo win.
You are probably not a broodwar player but if some people remember the MistrZZZ vs Hullah controversy they understand why we need a real technical solution to detect the hackers ...
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On October 05 2010 00:52 MuadDib wrote:
-It's not much data. It's just unit type, position and maybe upgrades (although this can be optimized). It is literally maybe a couple of bytes per unit. How many units are going to be revealed at once? Not a whole lot...
It actually is much data.
- Unit id
- Unit type
- Unit position (x/y)
- Movement vector (delta x/y)
- Movement command (attack, move, patrol)
- Upgrades
- Buffs
- Debuffs
- Spellcasts
- Flying Projectiles
- Kills
- Unit status (which animation to draw)
And now imagine an 8 player game with 50-100 Mutas each, flying around and just slighty stepping in and out of fog of war...
The whole unit state right now can be persistent until there is a change, so you only send updated movement vectors, referring to the unit id. If you wanted a true fog of war system, you would need to send a lot of individual updates. Something that is 1 packet right now (for example one long movement), can become dozens of packets if you want to only give the client what he has to know (fog of war in between the sightings). Well yes, you could do some sort of caching here, but then you would need to compare the version of the cached state which would mean even more unnecessary control information and if you want it granular for individual attributes, the control data transmission would exceed the data, unless you store state about client updates on the server as well, to insanely increase server hardware requirements..
Plus you need some sort of border at which you start showing stuff, so it does not suddenly "pop in". Again it would be possible to visualize that and give the maphacker more information.
Furthermore, the whole replay would have to be constructed and stored on the server instead of the client.
Overall, it would make the whole thing insanely complex, especially if you want to achieve a consistent and smooth gaming experience even for people with low bandwidth and slow connections and it would stress the servers a lot more, since fog of war calculations are pretty intense.
The warden way is probably a lot easier to implement and allows for a better gaming experience for the legit players instead of making them suffer for the cheats.. They only got to ban really frequent. And if they would enforce the requirement of a real identity and ban you forever, people would probably stop using that shit quite quickly. ;P
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On October 05 2010 01:14 MuadDib wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2010 01:11 Klumaster wrote:
I think the idea currently is that it uses deterministic/lockstep simulation - the units are 100% predictable so they don't need to transmit any state. Instead you just transmit orders given by the players.
One problem you'd have with "hidden units not transmitted" system is that if a hacked client did manage to bypass Warden, you could (for instance) not actually build anything for the first five minutes, scout their base, and instantly spawn a believable counter anywhere in their fog of war. You could even spawn impossible armies so long as they they weren't so ridiculous that the opponent would realize. Not to mention no one would be able to watch replays. Hmm, yeah I guess that makes things more complicated. I guess if the clients transmitted orders to the server it might be easier, but that is a lot more server load and perhaps lag issues.
Yeah, then you're moving into the realm of Blizzard hosting dedicated servers for every game. Without a hefty subscription fee, I don't see that happening.
I suppose they could do a system that lets the clients handle game state, but also logs all their commands on the server and gives you them at the end. No idea if that's feasible for the current volume of players, but that would make it easy to see a cheat, since the replay would desync the minute they did something impossible.
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On October 05 2010 00:13 Klumaster wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2010 23:13 Ashur wrote:On October 04 2010 23:08 Klumaster wrote:
Wouldn't address space layout randomisation at least make this kind of thing a bit harder? I'm not really an expert on it, and I can see how maybe with massive knowledge of the game you could follow a chain of pointers to always find the appropriate data, but I don't know, is it even feasible to know that much? I'm guessing the current generation just works by knowing where to look in advance? Randomization? Like to find pointer(s) to randomized data? The game needs to know where it is. And if game knows, hacker knows. Don't worry, I'm not completely stupid. What I mean is that a hacker currently might not need to know the entire structure of the program - if unit info always gets stored in the same place, or pointers to it always get stored in the same place, that's all the hack needs to read. With more randomisation, surely you'd need a much more in-depth knowledge of the game, because you'd have to work out where the game's core had been allocated, then work your way down the whole hierarchy. Or I suppose some sort of pattern-matching could find it? I don't know, it's not exactly my area.
I never worked anti-hack or security but just starting to think about it makes me want to take up this (futile, according to Ashur) mantle.
I think you're on to something here, but randomly spreading the data around, by maybe randomizing the order of allocating structs or something, would only be half the battle. Ashur is saying they want to knwo the number of workers, so there is still a word somewhere in RAM that says "0x00000010" and hackers will find it by knowing what the data should be and hunting for it. They'll train one probe at a time and monitoring memory to see what word increments, or something like this. So you can't just hide the data by moving it around.
How about spreading the data around and obfuscating it in RAM? Ashur, I'd like to know whether this sounds hard to crack to you. So you've got some obs data like mineral income, let's say the true word is 0xaabbccdd. How many of these critical words are there? Maybe a few hundred (units/buildings/positions/upgrades all secret player state)? Let's store them inefficiently to hide them, and only reconstruct them in registers. No outside process can peek at register values or even if they could, know what they're looking at, could they? I never looked at a hack in my life but I believe this has to be true. That's just how computers work, you context switch everything out when a new program, like a hack, gets the CPU.
So we take 0xaabbccdd and split it up somehow, say into 4 four words with bit shift--I know we can come up with something sneakier, but its a example:
0x000aa0
0x000bb0
0x000cc0
0x000dd0
Now do what Klumaster said and put those 4 words somewhere different in memory every time game loads, just so they are hard to correlate as one value. Then, NEVER store the true value 0xaabbccdd in RAM, never in a packet, nothing.
Load the split values into registers, bit shift, then OR together, BAM hackers never see the mineral income.
Another problem: hackers will load game and probe it like black box to undo what you did: fine, generate pseudo random "effects" from every game action that make dummy values tick and tack all over. Make it so painful to find that they won't. I mean, would you mind wasting a megabyte of memory if it made good noise for hiding important values?
What do you think, Ashur, or have you already busted through something 10x beefier?
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On October 05 2010 00:24 RebirthOfLeGenD wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2010 23:36 Chill wrote:
Wait, why are you allowed to post here still?
I've always thought it was a sad story that you went from coding tools the entire SC community used to coding SC hacks. Can you post more on this? From the sounds of it he accidentally make a program for BW that could be interpreted as a hack so he didn't release it, and for SC2 he tried making an undetectable hack (possibly to prove a point to blizzard?)
I believe it's in reference to this thread
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=85836
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It'd be neat if people of talent actually applied it for... iuno, good, and not fag.
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On October 05 2010 01:21 dimfish wrote:
So we take 0xaabbccdd and split it up somehow, say into 4 four words with bit shift--I know we can come up with something sneakier, but its a example:
0x000aa0
0x000bb0
0x000cc0
0x000dd0
Now do what Klumaster said and put those 4 words somewhere different in memory every time game loads, just so they are hard to correlate as one value. Then, NEVER store the true value 0xaabbccdd in RAM, never in a packet, nothing.
Could be easier just to XOR it with a random value that's also hidden at a random location, obviously if the hacker has total knowledge they already know where that value is, and also where your four bitshifted parts are, and how to recombine them.
What I'm interested in knowing is does the hacker spend time and effort looking for that counter that goes up? Do they have to play practice games where they do specific things to find which counters change, or is this something they can automate so it just searches out the data while they play?
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On October 04 2010 21:21 Ashur wrote:
You might think, that it actually advertise cheats, but truth is that it just describes how the current problematics works and how it worked in SC1...
...So, when SC2 beta came out, I was evil enough to fight for the shadowwalker's glory and research code like mad to finish the maphack as first in the world.
The sources (not just mine) are already published...
Yes, there might be technical argues that you can find the handle in other processes, but... if you think twice.. Blizzard cannot do that because of thousand reasons.
Just in case you are interested in the source codes, feel free to PM me I will guide you.
I'm baffled by the positive response this is getting on TL. This thread is absolutely "I've made an undetectable hack look at my e-peen." He openly invites anyone to PM him for a look at his awesome code, and provides no real reason as to why this won't turn out to be the same tug-of-war it has always been (updated hack, updated warden, updated hack and so on). His entire argument is 'trust me guys, this one can't be beat.' I would understand if this were a report on new hacking methods (made by someone other than the OP) and what could potentially by done about them. As it stands, what does this add to the community other than inflating the OP's ego?
I think its particularly appalling that he can openly state that he has published his maphack code.
This is attention whoring at its worst.
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To all those obfuscate / hide / encrypt comments: This will never work. Period.
It's the same as with copy protection: everything that is in software can be broken. The only viable protection is in hardware and even that can be broken with a mod chip after all. As long as we have normal computers without trusted computing in hardware, there will be ways to hack.
And: you can never win that fight by trying to hide stuff. Hackers will figure, they are more and they got more time and resources than you. You only give them a challenge and motivate them even more if you try to hide it.
The only solution imho is warden with frequently updated modules and more frequent banwaves. I am not that much into software though to know the details of sandbox solutions and how it behaves if run inside a virtual environment, while the hack resides on the host system... There will probably be ways to figure it out for a long while at least which will lead to enough banwaves to make the average kiddie be too frightened to use it. ;o)
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It's a valid area of research. I am genuinely surprised Blizzard uses such a simplistic methods...
Edit:
And make no mistake, it's possible there is no Perfect Solution (unless all calculations are done server side, which still isn't feasible), it should be a hell of a lot harder than this.
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On October 04 2010 23:43 RyanRushia wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2010 22:57 GoDannY wrote:
All we can do is raise the barrier for those without in-depth knowledge about exploiting and programming to prevent them from using an actual hack. Those who are desperate to hack will do so and will find a way, sadly, but true.
But I think a hack in a shooter (aka wallhack and aimbot) are more of a threat than a maphack in Starcraft. Still it is annoying as hell, though, unless the hacker found some time to learn how to play, it wont help him as much as a hack in a shooter would do.
I hope we still have some progress regarding anti-cheat from both sides, the community and Blizzard. Thanks Ashur for the read! this isn't necessarily true, in warcraft 3 towards the ends of it life (close to when sc2 came out) there was a hack that pretty much did it all. Complete map vision (thats a given) but it also could result in buildings that were invincible (so you could literally never lose, you would lose all your units but your buildings coudlnt be targeted so it woudl come down to which person would be willing to stay in game longer for a win), and a "micro" portion of it, which meant all you had to do was attack move into a base, and when your units reached 100ish health (this was low in wc3 for those that didnt play it) they would automatically be sent back to your base, without you having to touch them this hack raged on for months without any type of intervention from Blizzard, but we all just assumed it was due to them putting so much work into sc2.... i hope that if anyhting serious occurs at sc2 they will be able to fix it much faster
fuck... i remember that invincible buildings hack, people used it in ffa often. There was also a period of about 2-3 weeks where around 1/3rd of FFAs never got started because they got drop hacked. I hope blizz keeps bnet clean, or god knows private servers are going to have to pop up just like in sc1.
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United States4126 Posts
This is really depressing to hear about. I hope Blizzard takes this seriously as it ruins the experience of all the normal people who ladder.
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Calgary25981 Posts
On October 05 2010 00:24 RebirthOfLeGenD wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2010 23:36 Chill wrote:
Wait, why are you allowed to post here still?
I've always thought it was a sad story that you went from coding tools the entire SC community used to coding SC hacks. Can you post more on this? From the sounds of it he accidentally make a program for BW that could be interpreted as a hack so he didn't release it, and for SC2 he tried making an undetectable hack (possibly to prove a point to blizzard?)
Okay. Well, Ashur used to make sick tools for BW. I can't list or even remember them all, but I think he programmed the original Replay With Audio system (way before VODs). Oh wait that was tec27, but I think he helped improve it. He also made Penguin Plug, which was before Chaos Launcher as a launcher that let you plugin useful tools. He also developed FPReplays, which let you watch replays in first person, kind of like an alpha version of the current SC2 system. All his stuff was so sick.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=35962
Then somewhere down the road I guess he just switched over to developing and releasing maphacks. I never understood what happened to cause the change...
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=51691
On April 07 2007 16:33 Ashur wrote:Show nested quote +On April 07 2007 16:31 Cloud wrote:On April 07 2007 16:26 Ashur wrote:On April 07 2007 16:23 Cloud wrote:
Then you made this hack for what, precisely? To make an antihack you need to know//make a hack first. I made many cheats in my life, only few was released to the private groups. ??? Then whats the point of this thread? Threaten people with releasing a hack that wont do shit (only to your reputation) unless they spew out their feelings for this game to you? What the hell is the point of that other than crying for attention? If you dont want to talk, leave. I dont make any threats. I just want to discuss the passion. And my passion is making hacks.
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Im not familiar with...uh... gaming related network stuff (or networking at all). But would server based fog be viable as bandwiths do get bigger? Is ping directly affected by larger amounts of data even if you have enough bandwith?
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On October 05 2010 01:42 Gerbeeros wrote:
Im not familiar with...uh... gaming related network stuff (or networking at all). But would server based fog be viable as bandwiths do get bigger? Is ping directly affected by larger amounts of data even if you have enough bandwith?
It is also an issue as far as investments by blizzard go.
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The hack thing is somethin I am really worried about since I had some really bad experience with WC3 - so many ppl were hacking and blizz kinda did not really care. Looking at CoD: Modern Warfare 2 players are complaining about massive hacking as well.
One way to solve this would be to make ppl pay for bnet - just a few bucks like 5$ or 5€. That way blizzard really has an incentive to make bnet hack-free. However I hope there is a better solution to it.
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On October 05 2010 01:42 Gerbeeros wrote:
Im not familiar with...uh... gaming related network stuff (or networking at all). But would server based fog be viable as bandwiths do get bigger? Is ping directly affected by larger amounts of data even if you have enough bandwith?
If unit calculations are still done client side, then it wouldn't help anyway. All units on the map would still be known in memory.
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I think we should give Blizzard some credit and see how it goes.
I'm pretty sure they're aware of their vulnerabilities and have a plan B (and C and D) for when more cheaters do strike
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The problem is that if only the server knows where all units are and what they're doing, it's also the server's job to handle damage... basically you end up running the whole game in Blizzard's data centre and the players' machines become clients. After that, I'm not sure if you'd have to do more work (the way you do in FPS games) to make the client side seem responsive enough, but what's more important is that Blizzard probably already has some fairly heavy machinery running just to pipe command streams from player to player for the millions of games that are going on. If they suddenly have to host each one? I doubt that's something they could handle, let alone something they could handle without having us pay them a big pile of money.
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who cares if they cheat, seriously?
People cheat everywhere, all the time in sports.
Can you detect every time you play Billiard against someone, or poker with your friends or whatever that they don't cheat? No you can't.
The only thing that matters in sc2, like in real sports, is that in it's highest competitive form, offline tournament play, is that there nobody will cheat and they won't/can't.
so really, is it so important that this random dude beat you online on ladder cause he hacked?
who gives a fuck, you know that it doesn't count and that you would beat him in a square fight, you should be content with that.
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i got banned for using a g15 keyboard or i think i got banned for that i'm still waiting on clarification though.
could i ask maybe, if its not because of that what other programs would get them to ban me? xfire? livestream in background?
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I don't think the maphack discussion is very interesting. First because Blizzard apparently made a decision that minimizing server ressources per player is more important than being maphack proof. And secondly because I think they're right. The amount of players who will win against a better player only because they used maphacks (in a way that is not obvious, obviously) is very low. It is not an issue when the results of A game actually matter so who cares.
What I am far more interested in is streaming replays, because I think this is a point Blizzard would or at least should be interested in also. I mean I don't know the architecture of the StarCraft II engine but I think for them it would be fairly easy to implement a way to stream replays to a bunch of observers. this would also eliminate the problem we are currently having with observers lagging a game. There could be featured games where anybody can log in at any point in the game (still watch the whole game if they want to of course) and there could be password protected functionality to stream live audio from one or more observers, too.
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On October 05 2010 01:37 Chill wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2010 00:24 RebirthOfLeGenD wrote:On October 04 2010 23:36 Chill wrote:
Wait, why are you allowed to post here still?
I've always thought it was a sad story that you went from coding tools the entire SC community used to coding SC hacks. Can you post more on this? From the sounds of it he accidentally make a program for BW that could be interpreted as a hack so he didn't release it, and for SC2 he tried making an undetectable hack (possibly to prove a point to blizzard?) Okay. Well, Ashur used to make sick tools for BW. I can't list or even remember them all, but I think he programmed the original Replay With Audio system (way before VODs). Oh wait that was tec27, but I think he helped improve it. He also made Penguin Plug, which was before Chaos Launcher as a launcher that let you plugin useful tools. He also developed FPReplays, which let you watch replays in first person, kind of like an alpha version of the current SC2 system. All his stuff was so sick. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=35962Then somewhere down the road I guess he just switched over to developing and releasing maphacks. I never understood what happened to cause the change... http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=51691Show nested quote +On April 07 2007 16:33 Ashur wrote:On April 07 2007 16:31 Cloud wrote:On April 07 2007 16:26 Ashur wrote:On April 07 2007 16:23 Cloud wrote:
Then you made this hack for what, precisely? To make an antihack you need to know//make a hack first. I made many cheats in my life, only few was released to the private groups. ??? Then whats the point of this thread? Threaten people with releasing a hack that wont do shit (only to your reputation) unless they spew out their feelings for this game to you? What the hell is the point of that other than crying for attention? If you dont want to talk, leave. I dont make any threats. I just want to discuss the passion. And my passion is making hacks.
wow so sad. That sucks, I guess he likes the challenge of finding holes in games and exploiting them.
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If hackers are so smart why can't they learn to play SC2 without cheats? Just sayin.
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It is not a battle in hacker's favor. Hackers are only fueled by interest, while blizzard programmers gets paid by money and does it for a living.
Eventually Sc2 would be too secured to be worth the effort to hack or all the hackers just lose all interest in cracking sc2. You can say that all they need is 1 good hack that avoids detection and they are good but blizzard is not blind. Revealing any hacks that you make in the public, will get their attention. If you can read their code, then they can read your code and make appropriate changes to counteract it.
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On October 05 2010 01:55 Rah wrote:
If hackers are so smart why can't they learn to play SC2 without cheats? Just sayin.
because playing sc2 has nothing to do with being smart, nothing.
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On October 05 2010 01:57 Kexx wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2010 01:55 Rah wrote:
If hackers are so smart why can't they learn to play SC2 without cheats? Just sayin. because playing sc2 has nothing to do with being smart, nothing.
Someone's lost one too many games recently. I can pull up at least a dozen examples of the smarter player winning in SC2, but think what you want.
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Best thing to do is live with it and permanently ban caught offenders from the community. Ex-hackers still piss me off to this day, and their reputations with a lot of people are going to be forever tarnished (I'm looking at you lastshadow).
But, it's inevitable. Hackers just don't have the passion to actually get better at the game. They are pathetic, selfish losers deserving of respect only from their pale and horribly inept brethren.
Great, good job you learned how software works. Thanks for wasting your time ruining our e-sport. It literally makes me sick. Watching that video in the OP made my stomach churn. Hacking is the most horrible thing you can do with respect to competitive video games.
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The "memory walk" issue has been a known security problem with basically all high-profile applications ever written. There are even entire languages (specifically the financially-focused language "R") that have been designed around obfusification of memory addresses. Windows itself keeps things like password field buffers split into hundreds of different addresses, and even this is not fool proof. I assume even basic obfusication would massivly hurt the performance of SC2... But there has to be a clever way of at least -partially- obscuring the registers for any particular bit of allocated memory that SC2 takes... I'd guess something as simple as using a hardware address, and IRQ or (I'm not a Windows buff so I don't know the reality of this) entropy.
Again though... adding a single operation to every memory lookup would probably cripple the performance of SC2.
Just to help with those who do not understand: what he is saying is that there are programs being developed that "scan" the current "state" of SC2 and can report what they find. There is literally no way for SC2 itsself to know this is happening, short of looking for other processes that might be checking on its registeres (which is computationally problematic, not to mention bad programming practice, as well as cpu intense). The only logical solution is to have SC2 "hide" its allocations or to encrypt its memory. The former is more realistic than the latter due to it being simplier and therefore easier to do 5 million times a second.
All I can say as a positive note is that these players will never win tournaments... Otherwise, the only realistic solution from _our_ perspective is a "blacklist" application that simply checks for running applications with a memory footprint that looks like a known "scanner" cheat. Simply put, we really need to start making an index of every single "scanner". It would at very least keep 99% of the script-kiddies from cheating, although it wouldn't stop anyone smart enough to flip a few bits in their "scanner".
Food for thought I guess. Good thing there is more to SC than responding to a build or unit placement. It also requires micro and macro, which no cheat can help you with.
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On October 05 2010 02:02 Rah wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2010 01:57 Kexx wrote:On October 05 2010 01:55 Rah wrote:
If hackers are so smart why can't they learn to play SC2 without cheats? Just sayin. because playing sc2 has nothing to do with being smart, nothing. Someone's lost one too many games recently. I can pull up at least a dozen examples of the smarter player winning in SC2, but think what you want.
You can be the computer world's answer to Enstein if you wish, if you dont have the APM to make up for it, you're gonna lose games.
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On October 05 2010 02:23 erulabs wrote:
The "memory walk" issue has been a known security problem with basically all high-profile applications ever written. There are even entire languages (specifically the financially-focused language "R") that have been designed around obfusification of memory addresses. Windows itself keeps things like password field buffers split into hundreds of different addresses, and even this is not fool proof. I assume even basic obfusication would massivly hurt the performance of SC2... But there has to be a clever way of at least -partially- obscuring the registers for any particular bit of allocated memory that SC2 takes... I'd guess something as simple as using a hardware address, and IRQ or (I'm not a Windows buff so I don't know the reality of this) entropy.
Again though... adding a single operation to every memory lookup would probably cripple the performance of SC2.
Just to help with those who do not understand: what he is saying is that there are programs being developed that "scan" the current "state" of SC2 and can report what they find. There is literally no way for SC2 itsself to know this is happening, short of looking for other processes that might be checking on its registeres (which is computationally problematic, not to mention bad programming practice, as well as cpu intense). The only logical solution is to have SC2 "hide" its allocations or to encrypt its memory. The former is more realistic than the latter due to it being simplier and therefore easier to do 5 million times a second.
All I can say as a positive note is that these players will never win tournaments... Otherwise, the only realistic solution from _our_ perspective is a "blacklist" application that simply checks for running applications with a memory footprint that looks like a known "scanner" cheat. Simply put, we really need to start making an index of every single "scanner". It would at very least keep 99% of the script-kiddies from cheating, although it wouldn't stop anyone smart enough to flip a few bits in their "scanner".
Food for thought I guess. Good thing there is more to SC than responding to a build or unit placement. It also requires micro and macro, which no cheat can help you with.
Great post here, though I have no ability to verify the correctness with my limited understanding of what goes into one of these programs.
You could draw a comparison to anti-viruses, though. A lot of viruses need to be specifically cataloged by the software to be dealt with, and sometimes, it's impossible to preemptively defend against a specific virus, a la security holes.
There's always going to be hackers (look at WoW! ahaha) so there's nothing we can really do about that. Hopefully as many as possible get banned.
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Lets hope activision-blizzard doesn't handle this the same way activision-infinityward handled hacks in modern warfare 2 (they didn't to a thing).
After seeing how non-attentive and slow they are to react to players issues about balance, then after 2 months only banning 5000 players from the several million, it just worries me about the hacks. Hopefully they wont become rampant like they've been in other blizzard games before blizz does anything.
The one ray of hope i do have though is that with starcraft 2 tied to peoples battle.net accounts, theres a portion of players, myself included, who wouldn't risk doing anything "blizzard-illegal" because i'd risk loosing all my games tied to my bnet account, which would really suck.
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On October 05 2010 01:50 Klumaster wrote:
The problem is that if only the server knows where all units are and what they're doing, it's also the server's job to handle damage... basically you end up running the whole game in Blizzard's data centre and the players' machines become clients. After that, I'm not sure if you'd have to do more work (the way you do in FPS games) to make the client side seem responsive enough, but what's more important is that Blizzard probably already has some fairly heavy machinery running just to pipe command streams from player to player for the millions of games that are going on. If they suddenly have to host each one? I doubt that's something they could handle, let alone something they could handle without having us pay them a big pile of money.
Not only that, but it would also require a massive reprogramming of the game. Even then there's no guarantee that someone wouldn't still be able to exploit the system. While I'm sure there would be some way to deal with this issue, remember that Blizzard is a business, I find it unlikely that they would spend potentially many thousands of dollars in development of a fix for an issue that most common players will likely remain oblivious to.
Unless they begin getting horribly bad press over the issue I find it highly unlikely that Blizzard will do anything about this, and even if they do likely it wouldn't be until HoTS.
The ultimate fix would be to allow third parties like iCCup to operate SC2 servers that could be meticulously modded, however we all know that is not going to happen in the foreseeable future.
On October 05 2010 01:37 Chill wrote:Okay. Well, Ashur used to make sick tools for BW. I can't list or even remember them all, but I think he programmed the original Replay With Audio system (way before VODs). Oh wait that was tec27, but I think he helped improve it. He also made Penguin Plug, which was before Chaos Launcher as a launcher that let you plugin useful tools. He also developed FPReplays, which let you watch replays in first person, kind of like an alpha version of the current SC2 system. All his stuff was so sick. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=35962Then somewhere down the road I guess he just switched over to developing and releasing maphacks. I never understood what happened to cause the change... http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=51691
I think there is a Batman/Ra's al Ghul analogy somewhere in here...
I get why someone would want to make a hack, it's an interesting and complex challenge that some people simply cannot refuse. It's like asking why people climb Everest, because it's there. And in all fairness, one should acknowledge the complex nature of his achievement. Unfortunately its rather akin to the development of the atomic weapon. I also get the distinct feeling that he did not post this here for our benefit but rather to fuel his own ego. After all, what good is climbing Everest if you can't tell people that you climbed Everest...
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On October 05 2010 02:23 erulabs wrote:
The "memory walk" issue has been a known security problem with basically all high-profile applications ever written. There are even entire languages (specifically the financially-focused language "R") that have been designed around obfusification of memory addresses. Windows itself keeps things like password field buffers split into hundreds of different addresses, and even this is not fool proof. I assume even basic obfusication would massivly hurt the performance of SC2... But there has to be a clever way of at least -partially- obscuring the registers for any particular bit of allocated memory that SC2 takes... I'd guess something as simple as using a hardware address, and IRQ or (I'm not a Windows buff so I don't know the reality of this) entropy.
Again though... adding a single operation to every memory lookup would probably cripple the performance of SC2.
Just to help with those who do not understand: what he is saying is that there are programs being developed that "scan" the current "state" of SC2 and can report what they find. There is literally no way for SC2 itsself to know this is happening, short of looking for other processes that might be checking on its registeres (which is computationally problematic, not to mention bad programming practice, as well as cpu intense). The only logical solution is to have SC2 "hide" its allocations or to encrypt its memory. The former is more realistic than the latter due to it being simplier and therefore easier to do 5 million times a second.
All I can say as a positive note is that these players will never win tournaments... Otherwise, the only realistic solution from _our_ perspective is a "blacklist" application that simply checks for running applications with a memory footprint that looks like a known "scanner" cheat. Simply put, we really need to start making an index of every single "scanner". It would at very least keep 99% of the script-kiddies from cheating, although it wouldn't stop anyone smart enough to flip a few bits in their "scanner".
Food for thought I guess. Good thing there is more to SC than responding to a build or unit placement. It also requires micro and macro, which no cheat can help you with.
Not sure why a simplified random address space layout couldn't be emulated directly by SC2.
That said given that Vista and OSX have native libraries that will do ASLR surely Blizzard has some of these options enabled in SC2...
Are we really saying that SC2 has a totally static memory layout? If so that is totally insane and a complete failure on Blizzards part.
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There are those who were once good, now corrupted. Lured by the increased size of an e-peen, they have fallen to the dark side. They now have given up all hope and drink whiskey doubles while bragging about their mad hacker skills.
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Maybe this is far fetched, but having a separate encryption algorithm for each SC2 account would make cheating very tricky... that way one hack won't work for everyone. And having a random generator like the Authenticator to generate a new encryption algorithm each time you log in/start a game would be very cool.
I'm not a hacker, in fact I don't know much of what I'm talking about, but it all makes since in my head, so hopefully someone else will understand.
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Thats really unfortunate news
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This makes me very sad. What you're saying is that SC2 is inherently and irrevocably vulnerable to hacks?
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Bear with me this may be a long first post, but Chill is right, I don't understand how this is a productive dialogue.
You are basically telling us the situation is helpless, you explain in detail for other programmers ways that they may be able to make use of your discoveries and take advantage of exploits you have discovered. You then offer to send people source code that might help in the creation of new hacks??
I wanted to ask you a question, for who's benefit was this thread posted? The community is aware of the hacking epidemic, and many people were aware that some of the hacks that exist would be difficult for blizzard to fix, so I don't understand who this helps, other then programmers seeking a better way to improve upon there inferior hacks, or even enticing new programmers who have not yet attempted to make hacks interested by pointing out that the method you mentioned may be undetectable for a period of time? Is this something we want in TL forums?
Finally, I want to set you a challenge / make a request, to you and the rest of the talented and skilled programmers that are part of the SC2 community. Like chill mentioned, in the past you have been a crusader for positive community software, to me it seems like right now, that is not the path you are pursuing. Blizzard is a company, and as such, it has certain limitations, like many have mentioned, a lot of the best ways to combat hacking raise legal or ethical problems for the company. My question is this, if Blizzard put YOU in charge of finding ways to combat hacks, what would you do? Do you see any solutions, or just more problems? If you feel that Blizzard cannot combat this, do you think it would be possible to develop a launcher that could? I fail to believe there is no viable solution to this problem.
There are far to many competent programmers seeking to create hacks, and in some cases even profit from them, and far to few who are on the other side of the equation. In a perfect world Blizzard would handle this for us, but it is very obvious that they cant. So it seems to me like what we need most is for some of the MANY talented individuals such as yourself to rally on the side of the SC2 community. To rally on the side eSports and the competitive community to help foster and protect this thing we all love before the hackers can pollute and damage it irreversibly.
Ready to get on our side?
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On October 05 2010 03:12 SilverPotato wrote:
Maybe this is far fetched, but having a separate encryption algorithm for each SC2 account would make cheating very tricky... that way one hack won't work for everyone. And having a random generator like the Authenticator to generate a new encryption algorithm each time you log in/start a game would be very cool.
What do you mean a seperate encryption algorithm? Really a new algorithm?
Or just the same algorithm with different values?
When it's only different values they hackers "only" need to look up said value (which must be stored locally so SC2 can decrypt the stuff). Having a new algorithm seems not possible.
Can you "win" vs hackers? No.
Can you make it hard for hackers? Yeah, sure.
There exists a nice article about the cracking of games (not hacking) - but I think some rules can be applied as well.
One important part is:
Thus we wanted to make the job of cracking YOTD time-consuming and tedious. If we could just keep the crackers busy at finding the protection, that's time taken away from them working out how to remove it. Again, we were trying to reduce the pool of people available who could crack the game. Not every cracker would have enough time available to make the crack; it probably isn't anyone's day job. On this note, it's worth pointing out that for most crackers this is a hobby. If they get bored, they may well give up. We tried to make the crackers have to wade through plenty of chaff before finding the protection.
Will some hackers be encouraged to hack the difficult system? Yes - but what if you change everything on a monthly basis?
Will most hackers really be "Ok here I go again" or not just "I have proven in an earlier build that I can hack it - no need to invest so much time again"?
Make hacking boring & tedious.
I honestly dont know though if obfuscating would help against the measure Ashur mentioned. Probably yes, because he mentioned memory lookups?
Edit:
Before I forget it: Thanks for your post Ashur. I always like reading about that kind of stuff
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Well if he lets us pick his brain about how to make hacks, maybe we can suggest some new ways to stop them, or maybe make it so painful to unravel they find some other game to pick on.
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It's the same with wallhacks in games like Counterstrike. I think that this issue is pretty easily fixed (if you look at the scale of programmers Blizzard has available) by only sending the information to the correct client, that the client would be able to recieve. I can not at all imagine this to be impossible or even hard. The only problem it would pose is that the replay is not clientsidedly recorded and the solution to that would be to have the server send out the full replay at the end (which is no f-ing problem since replays are only <200KB..) It would probably increase the serverside load but I can't imagine it being worse than having a game that sends all the info of the current state of the game (which just seems immensely naive to me).
Can someone enlighten me as to why Blizzard decided to make it so easy?
I have such faith in this being so "easy" to fix because even in an old game like counterstrike, the data as to where opponents are and what they are doing is limited to a certain distance (or something like that) which is not even necessary to program in an RTS.
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On October 05 2010 03:24 BigBen wrote:
You then offer to send people source code that might help in the creation of new hacks??
I think you're a bit harsh on him.
Said source code needs to be available so people might figure out ways to prevent said stuff.
Maybe one smart/talented person reads this - gets the sourcecode from Ashur and then finds a way to detect / prevent people using those kind of hacks.
Would you rather have that person try to find out _how_ those hacks work (aka make write his own hack first) and then modify it that it cannot be used again?
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United States12235 Posts
On October 05 2010 01:37 Chill wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2010 00:24 RebirthOfLeGenD wrote:On October 04 2010 23:36 Chill wrote:
Wait, why are you allowed to post here still?
I've always thought it was a sad story that you went from coding tools the entire SC community used to coding SC hacks. Can you post more on this? From the sounds of it he accidentally make a program for BW that could be interpreted as a hack so he didn't release it, and for SC2 he tried making an undetectable hack (possibly to prove a point to blizzard?) Okay. Well, Ashur used to make sick tools for BW. I can't list or even remember them all, but I think he programmed the original Replay With Audio system (way before VODs). Oh wait that was tec27, but I think he helped improve it. He also made Penguin Plug, which was before Chaos Launcher as a launcher that let you plugin useful tools. He also developed FPReplays, which let you watch replays in first person, kind of like an alpha version of the current SC2 system. All his stuff was so sick. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=35962Then somewhere down the road I guess he just switched over to developing and releasing maphacks. I never understood what happened to cause the change... http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=51691Show nested quote +On April 07 2007 16:33 Ashur wrote:On April 07 2007 16:31 Cloud wrote:On April 07 2007 16:26 Ashur wrote:On April 07 2007 16:23 Cloud wrote:
Then you made this hack for what, precisely? To make an antihack you need to know//make a hack first. I made many cheats in my life, only few was released to the private groups. ??? Then whats the point of this thread? Threaten people with releasing a hack that wont do shit (only to your reputation) unless they spew out their feelings for this game to you? What the hell is the point of that other than crying for attention? If you dont want to talk, leave. I dont make any threats. I just want to discuss the passion. And my passion is making hacks.
Hacking and anti-hacking are two sides of the same coin, so I don't fault Ashur for the maphacks he's made (and as far as I know he's never distributed a working, unpatched one). Technically speaking, and he's not a native English speaker so his words may be misinterpreted, everything he's made is a hack. BWTV/OP3 was a hack, PenguinPlug which he helped on was a hack, every single project.
To know how to beat a hack you have to study how the hack works, which is what Ashur's entire project is based on. Sometimes that involves creating your own hacks that emulate the same effect. It would be one thing if there were malicious intent behind developing the hacks, but I don't think there are, given his history. If he says that emulating the game client is a way to make a hack undetectable by Warden's current methods, I'm inclined to believe him, and it's something we should be aware of. Any shortcomings in Blizzard's system need to be compensated for by watchful end-users, so it's better that we know about them than continue to live in blissful ignorance.
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The thing is, I don't really care if people cheat. If I am in a game, and my build gets perfectly countered and I get wiped out, I am gonna get annoyed, punch my keyboard, then watch the replay. Then I am gonna get suspicious, watch his view, realize he is a hacker and feel a lot better. I didn't really lose that game. I am going to move onto the next game knowing that I will get better during it. I know that anyone who uses hacks won't get any better and has to create the facade of a win in order to supplement his lack of self-esteem.
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On October 05 2010 03:52 seaofsaturn wrote:
The thing is, I don't really care if people cheat. If I am in a game, and my build gets perfectly countered and I get wiped out, I am gonna get annoyed, punch my keyboard, then watch the replay. Then I am gonna get suspicious, watch his view, realize he is a hacker and feel a lot better. I didn't really lose that game. I am going to move onto the next game knowing that I will get better during it. I know that anyone who uses hacks won't get any better and has to create the facade of a win in order to supplement his lack of self-esteem.
yea but what if it gets to the point where every other game you play a hacker. Then even legit loses you assume that they hacked, and you never improve, and you just get angry.
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Hacking and anti-hacking are two sides of the same coin, so I don't fault Ashur for the maphacks he's made (and as far as I know he's never distributed a working, unpatched one). Technically speaking, and he's not a native English speaker so his words may be misinterpreted, everything he's made is a hack. BWTV/OP3 was a hack, PenguinPlug which he helped on was a hack, every single project.
To know how to beat a hack you have to study how the hack works, which is what Ashur's entire project is based on. Sometimes that involves creating your own hacks that emulate the same effect. It would be one thing if there were malicious intent behind developing the hacks, but I don't think there are, given his history. If he says that emulating the game client is a way to make a hack undetectable by Warden's current methods, I'm inclined to believe him, and it's something we should be aware of. Any shortcomings in Blizzard's system need to be compensated for by watchful end-users, so it's better that we know about them than continue to live in blissful ignorance.
The thing is, he gives absolutely no indication that this is actually his aim. In fact in later posts he basically says "give up, you can't beat my haxx." If he wanted to be helpful in anti-hacking, he would privately send this information to blizzard, who are the only people in a position to do anything about it until private servers become allowed (many, many years from now...)
The entire gist of his post is that anti-hack efforts are pointless, with a strong undertone of "look how l33t I am." (want to see my epic e-peen? PM for pics!)
(and as far as I know he's never distributed a working, unpatched one)
He actually says in the OP that he's already released the source for a working maphack. That's roughly 2 minutes away from actually being a working maphack.
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this really cuts the competitive spirit off right at the knees and is going to put a huge damper on tournaments where players are not in a controlled environment (ie virtually all of them). there will be cheaters with tremendous advantage, and an infinite number of false accusations. if blizzard was going to try and fight this technically with an obfuscation arms race they most certainly would have done it already.
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The funny thing is many of the people we watch on the streams playing tournies are probably using maphack by now. The mh's of today have camera spoofing which allows them to hover their camera over your base without you ever finding out through a replay. The minimap in itself is also a huge, huge advantage. Maybe it would be possible to invent a replay analyzer similar to bwhf or bwchart if there are any "anomalies" in spoofed replays.
Looking back at bw history, players like Testie, Haypro, Trek, TT1, lastshadow, Ares, Tittybang and many, many other players percieved to be really good were in fact using maphack.
Happening right now imo.
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On October 05 2010 01:37 Chill wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2010 00:24 RebirthOfLeGenD wrote:On October 04 2010 23:36 Chill wrote:
Wait, why are you allowed to post here still?
I've always thought it was a sad story that you went from coding tools the entire SC community used to coding SC hacks. Can you post more on this? From the sounds of it he accidentally make a program for BW that could be interpreted as a hack so he didn't release it, and for SC2 he tried making an undetectable hack (possibly to prove a point to blizzard?) Okay. Well, Ashur used to make sick tools for BW. I can't list or even remember them all, but I think he programmed the original Replay With Audio system (way before VODs). Oh wait that was tec27, but I think he helped improve it. He also made Penguin Plug, which was before Chaos Launcher as a launcher that let you plugin useful tools. He also developed FPReplays, which let you watch replays in first person, kind of like an alpha version of the current SC2 system. All his stuff was so sick. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=35962Then somewhere down the road I guess he just switched over to developing and releasing maphacks. I never understood what happened to cause the change... http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=51691Show nested quote +On April 07 2007 16:33 Ashur wrote:On April 07 2007 16:31 Cloud wrote:On April 07 2007 16:26 Ashur wrote:On April 07 2007 16:23 Cloud wrote:
Then you made this hack for what, precisely? To make an antihack you need to know//make a hack first. I made many cheats in my life, only few was released to the private groups. ??? Then whats the point of this thread? Threaten people with releasing a hack that wont do shit (only to your reputation) unless they spew out their feelings for this game to you? What the hell is the point of that other than crying for attention? If you dont want to talk, leave. I dont make any threats. I just want to discuss the passion. And my passion is making hacks.
Slight correction, I didn't make the original Replays With Audio stuff, that was JCA. Ashur also didn't make the original PenguinPlug, that was superpenguin (although Ashur took it over and added a bunch of stuff to it when superpenguin stopped working on it).
Ashur has made some pretty impressive stuff, and I think his hacks are impressive as well. However, this is like the 3rd or 4th iteration of this thread that he's posted, and I simply don't understand why he feels the need to keep posting it. Anyone who has spent any substantial amount of time working on hacks/plugins for SC2 or BW understands that it is very possible and easy to make undetectable hacks. Unfortunately, RTS games that make scouting vitally important will always be vulnerable to such hacks (unless someone comes up with some solution that doesn't involve storing all info with all players all the time). FPS games are often not vulnerable in the same way, simply because A) it is easier to keep most information on the server and not with the client and B) knowing such info is often not very useful.
There is no software solution that will work to deter these hacks for any lengthy period of time as long as all the unit info is given to all players all the time. And it is highly unlikely that Blizzard will ever change that factor for SC2, it is simply not feasible with current server/bandwidth costs and the sheer amount of servers they would need. All we can really do is try to root out hackers for their telltale hacking signs, hope that no one hacks in the lower money tournaments, and enforce some sort of manual checks by a 3rd party both before and during the games in big money tournaments (or keep the big money tournaments relegated to live events).
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On October 05 2010 03:54 Chriamon wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2010 03:52 seaofsaturn wrote:
The thing is, I don't really care if people cheat. If I am in a game, and my build gets perfectly countered and I get wiped out, I am gonna get annoyed, punch my keyboard, then watch the replay. Then I am gonna get suspicious, watch his view, realize he is a hacker and feel a lot better. I didn't really lose that game. I am going to move onto the next game knowing that I will get better during it. I know that anyone who uses hacks won't get any better and has to create the facade of a win in order to supplement his lack of self-esteem. yea but what if it gets to the point where every other game you play a hacker. Then even legit loses you assume that they hacked, and you never improve, and you just get angry.
I'd agree with this. There are also some players who have such good game sense that they know exactly what kind of build their opponents are going for without seeing what they're doing. Look at fruitdealer vs ITR in the GSL - in one of the matches fruitdealer went infestor baneling against itr's mass marine without ever scouting the mass marine, just because he took a chance and said "people always go muta on this because it's so good, and I use mutas a ton, so he's going to prep a strat vs muta. Thus, he'll go mass marine and I'll infestor baneling." If you played a game on ladder against him and that happened, you'd watch the replay and say "man, this guy is hacking, how did he know what I was doing" when in reality he's just amazingly good.
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I read that old thread and this one follows the same suit...
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Another way to look at it is: It is just too expensive to either provide the manpower or the servers to make it hacker proof. If the game was server sided than you need strong servers and more and more the more people buy the game. This is a matter of money. Since maintaining a server farm like this is more and more costy and can not be covered by just the game price. And the game does not have a monthly fee like WoW.
For the guys who suggested encrypting the data = same rules apply. Blizzard would need way more manpower than there are actually working on the game right now. Just to always encrypt it. This would be very costy. So we kinda have a trade off here. You tried a hacker from time to time vs a game with monthly fees.
The problem is not what Blizzard can not do. The problem is what Blizzard can afford.
Just my 2 cents...
Edit: Sorry for bad English, too lazy to correct it...
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Is it not possible for the server to send its data in an encrypted state which be decrypted, read, used and re-encrypted and sent back? I would guess that any real implementation of this would be extremely difficult to do though, especially on system requirements and network speeds.
It's just an unfortunate fact I guess. The only other method would be a separate program violating privacy.
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On October 05 2010 05:11 HaSDe wrote:
Another way to look at it is: It is just too expensive to either provide the manpower or the servers to make it hacker proof. If the game was server sided than you need strong servers and more and more the more people buy the game. This is a matter of money. Since maintaining a server farm like this is more and more costy and can not be covered by just the game price. And the game does not have a monthly fee like WoW.
For the guys who suggested encrypting the data = same rules apply. Blizzard would need way more manpower than there are actually working on the game right now. Just to always encrypt it. This would be very costy. So we kinda have a trade off here. You tried a hacker from time to time vs a game with monthly fees.
The problem is not what Blizzard can not do. The problem is what Blizzard can afford.
Just my 2 cents...
Edit: Sorry for bad English, too lazy to correct it...
Manpower isn't the reason for not encrypting data, performance is. If encrypting game data was going to stop hackers, and it didn't negatively impact performance, blizzard would have done it.
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On October 05 2010 05:24 sikyon wrote:
Is it not possible for the server to send its data in an encrypted state which be decrypted, read, used and re-encrypted and sent back? I would guess that any real implementation of this would be extremely difficult to do though, especially on system requirements and network speeds.
It's just an unfortunate fact I guess. The only other method would be a separate program violating privacy.
The problem here is that the hackers aren't intercepting the network stream. They're simply looking at the memory of the active starcraft 2 process and finding the locations where the game stores unit position information, etc.
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imagine you could run dual protection driver in ring0/ring3 hooking about anything relating memory access and mutually protecting their integrity... oh, right 
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On October 05 2010 04:00 FiveOh wrote:
...he would privately send this information to blizzard..
I did it, twice.. And guess what happened...
On October 05 2010 04:33 tec27 & Jakalo wrote:
this is like the 3rd or 4th iteration of this thread that he's posted....
Thanks for the correction (RWA, ...), and yeah - its right that its 3rd of 4th iteration, but so far it still graduates. Noone was thinking of this stuff in SC1, and noone was taking a care when SC2 was out... and now you got serious development out there and instead of displaying the map in the game, it will be your iPhone//notebook telling you what enemy is doing and if they spent hours on development, its gonna tell you what you should do to counter it with and where.. (html5+canvas, sounds, basic sc mechanics)
The new point is that this is gonna harm the online-tournaments and low division ladder, nothing more nothing less. As I said countless times, If you think I am cheater, fine. If you think I am attention whore, fine (i really spend hours daily of making attention on myself at these forums...), but the real truth it I am just a hacker. And I felt important to write, that the undetectable maphack is being forged, this time for real and all of you who asked got link to the sources that are on the internet.
To all coders (dimfish,...):
Obfuscation and randomization will delay the work for days, no matter what you try to do, if the game displays a number it must be deobfuscated somewhere... The only way is the "HoN" system, which is really hard (read it won't happen) to implement from this point for Blizzard.
Chill:+ Show Spoiler +On October 05 2010 01:37 Chill wrote:Show nested quote +On April 07 2007 16:33 Ashur wrote:
If you dont want to talk, leave. I dont make any threats. I just want to discuss the passion. And my passion is making hacks. I sign under this, again. Hacking is not cheating.
BigBen:+ Show Spoiler +On October 05 2010 03:24 BigBen wrote:
You are basically telling us the situation is helpless, you explain in detail for other programmers ways that they may be able to make use of your discoveries and take advantage of exploits you have discovered. You then offer to send people source code that might help in the creation of new hacks?? If you wont show the engine schema to a motor engineer, he won't be able to make a motorcycle. Ever. I shared all my sources, including the "good ones" that you could turn into "bad one" in just one hour (and oposite). PPlug knew your foe ipaddress for example, the unit numbers and counts and ids. It even knew if dropship is loaded with marines so it could display it in ObsMode properly... But it was only available if you were "observer".. I wanted to ask you a question, for who's benefit was this thread posted? The community is aware of the hacking epidemic, and many people were aware that some of the hacks that exist would be difficult for blizzard to fix, so I don't understand who this helps, other then programmers seeking a better way to improve upon there inferior hacks, or even enticing new programmers who have not yet attempted to make hacks interested by pointing out that the method you mentioned may be undetectable for a period of time? Is this something we want in TL forums? You can delete the thread. No matter what, you can't change the fact, that its on other places. If you wont say to your kids that Heroin exist in the world, if they want they find out anyways. Ignorance is not an option, but I don't want to convince you if you dont really beleive it is. Finally, I want to set you a challenge / make a request, to you and the rest of the talented and skilled programmers that are part of the SC2 community. Like chill mentioned, in the past you have been a crusader for positive community software, to me it seems like right now, that is not the path you are pursuing. Blizzard is a company, and as such, it has certain limitations, like many have mentioned, a lot of the best ways to combat hacking raise legal or ethical problems for the company. My question is this, if Blizzard put YOU in charge of finding ways to combat hacks, what would you do? Do you see any solutions, or just more problems? If you feel that Blizzard cannot combat this, do you think it would be possible to develop a launcher that could? I fail to believe there is no viable solution to this problem. Chill seems to not to know what's different between hacks and cheats. I try to help people to educate, to fight on "your" side some time in the future. I remember Master of Chaos, that didn't know a thing. I remember toc27, Taiche and all those ukraine ICC upcomming contributors. And yeah, I also remember some that turned to be evil and they started to produce cheats. That's life and I am happy that once a year there are so many new people willing to contribute in SC2 comunity development. And you fail to beleive there is no solution... better you do, coz its the way it really is. And I am not arogant, or smth like that. Take a beer and think of it. Ready to get on our side? I was on that side once, and lawyers in Blizzard were not convinced its good idea. At least other employees had different point of view, but well, you guess it right... Its easier to do on your own, its research, do this do that and tell the people how it is. You.. hate it, love it, think of it, do something about it. Thats what I really want from and for the community.
FiveOh:+ Show Spoiler +On October 05 2010 04:00 FiveOh wrote:
He actually says in the OP that he's already released the source for a working maphack. That's roughly 2 minutes away from actually being a working maphack. I did. And if you think its that easy, try it yourself. Yeah, its that easy for the badguys, that didn't really get it, they did it themselves and that source is available.
x7i:+ Show Spoiler +On October 05 2010 05:56 x7i wrote:imagine you could run dual protection driver in ring0/ring3 hooking about anything relating memory access and mutually protecting their integrity... oh, right Like starforce guys tried? We might see the cheater driver, which.. would be pretty amazing.
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On October 05 2010 06:23 Ashur wrote:
To all coders (dimfish,...):
Obfuscation and randomization will delay the work for days, no matter what you try to do, if the game displays a number it must be deobfuscated somewhere... The only way is the "HoN" system, which is really hard (read it won't happen) to implement from this point for Blizzard.
I'm assuming the system I talk about is the HoN system. I don't see why that would be so "hard" when you are a 999gazilion company able to afford the best programmers around.
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Ahh another cheating thread.
1) You guys are not going to solve the Full Disclosure argument in this thread. I'd personally prefer that he didn't release any specific code and stick to talking in general about problems like he discusses here. But it is his right of free speech to post whatever code he wants to.
2) It is impossible to generate a perfect Warden. This is the Halting Problem applied to computer security. IE
BreakWarden(Warden,Starcraft,Environment) =
if Warden(Starcraft,Enviornment + BreakWarden) == 'hacked' then exit
else add_hack(Starcraft , 'hack_code')
So if Warden says that BreakWarden is a hack, it simply exits (and thus does no hacking) and Warden is wrong, However if Warden says BreakWarden is not a hack, then it hacks the starcraft code and thus Warden is wrong again.
Note that I can construct a BreakWarden for any Warden that you give me and thus Warden is either only looks for specific hacks or it crushes loads of valid applications. No perfect Warden can ever exist.
3) There are some hardware cryptographic things that you could do like using Intel's Trusted Execution Technology to protect the sensitive memory locations. But that would require that all the players have the same processor brands and a capable motherboard to support this. That's not really feasible for general internet use.
4) There is no cryptographic system that can perfectly protect the memory while the game is running. As some point, you have to take the unit_loc.x and unit_loc.y and translate that into screen coordinates for rendering or adding velocity, etc. Even if you make that window of non-protection super short, someone will come along and figure out a way to capture that memory location or register while your game is running.
I remember in EQ1 they had several map hacks out there. EQ finally decided that they needed to bite the bullet and simply do the fog of war calculation themselves and only send the relevant values to the players. Blizzard will be forced into this position for the same reasons.
So there isn't really much for them to do. They will continue to update Warden to catch the most popular cheating programs. Any hand crafted cheating will likely get around Warden. And eventually they will have to do fog of war themselves and deliver only relevant values to the clients.
Honestly that's the end of the discussion.
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On October 05 2010 06:23 Ashur wrote:x7i: Show nested quote +On October 05 2010 05:56 x7i wrote:imagine you could run dual protection driver in ring0/ring3 hooking about anything relating memory access and mutually protecting their integrity... oh, right Like starforce guys tried? We might see the cheater driver, which.. would be pretty amazing.
you forgot that we already need to be connected, so more like vac + starforce, pretty much unbreakable with frequent updates and some polymorphic patcher - would take days to debug each iteration from scratch, and minutes to update from servers 
its a utter hack tho... vt-x messes the picture too
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thanks for the interesting discussion Ashur, i have 2 questions.
1. what is this HoN system you refer to? you appear to say that it is an obfuscation scheme which could work in theory, but i don't see how any such scheme can work, period.
2. do you know of a paper discussing the "tell the client only what they should know" approach? does it have a standardizd name in the literature? for as far as i can see this is the only way out to safety for competitive multiplayer games (which i adore...)
thanks eh
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Sadly Blizzard has a history of programming very hacker friendly. e.g in WoW the player coords are handled clientside. and because of this you see flying characters advertising for goldfarmers in citys, also teleporting and all that jazz.
thanks for the interessting read
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On October 05 2010 07:29 kflynn wrote:+ Show Spoiler +thanks for the interesting discussion Ashur, i have 2 questions.
1. what is this HoN system you refer to? you appear to say that it is an obfuscation scheme which could work in theory, but i don't see how any such scheme can work, period.
2. do you know of a paper discussing the "tell the client only what they should know" approach? does it have a standardizd name in the literature? for as far as i can see this is the only way out to safety for competitive multiplayer games (which i adore...)
thanks eh
#2 answers #1 :p In HoN the client does not have information about the units under the FoW
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Thanks for the read, sucks Blizz really can't do anything about the hacks at this point.
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On October 05 2010 01:21 dimfish wrote:I never worked anti-hack or security but just starting to think about it makes me want to take up this (futile, according to Ashur) mantle. + Show Spoiler +I think you're on to something here, but randomly spreading the data around, by maybe randomizing the order of allocating structs or something, would only be half the battle. Ashur is saying they want to knwo the number of workers, so there is still a word somewhere in RAM that says "0x00000010" and hackers will find it by knowing what the data should be and hunting for it. They'll train one probe at a time and monitoring memory to see what word increments, or something like this. So you can't just hide the data by moving it around.
How about spreading the data around and obfuscating it in RAM? Ashur, I'd like to know whether this sounds hard to crack to you. So you've got some obs data like mineral income, let's say the true word is 0xaabbccdd. How many of these critical words are there? Maybe a few hundred (units/buildings/positions/upgrades all secret player state)? Let's store them inefficiently to hide them, and only reconstruct them in registers. No outside process can peek at register values or even if they could, know what they're looking at, could they? I never looked at a hack in my life but I believe this has to be true. That's just how computers work, you context switch everything out when a new program, like a hack, gets the CPU.
So we take 0xaabbccdd and split it up somehow, say into 4 four words with bit shift--I know we can come up with something sneakier, but its a example:
0x000aa0
0x000bb0
0x000cc0
0x000dd0
Now do what Klumaster said and put those 4 words somewhere different in memory every time game loads, just so they are hard to correlate as one value. Then, NEVER store the true value 0xaabbccdd in RAM, never in a packet, nothing.
Load the split values into registers, bit shift, then OR together, BAM hackers never see the mineral income.
Another problem: hackers will load game and probe it like black box to undo what you did: fine, generate pseudo random "effects" from every game action that make dummy values tick and tack all over. Make it so painful to find that they won't. I mean, would you mind wasting a megabyte of memory if it made good noise for hiding important values?
What do you think, Ashur, or have you already busted through something 10x beefier?
If you're going to pick up the mantle, you should go and research the topic.
Two main things as a response to many of the posts in this thread:
1) I think many of you underestimate the a) talent, and b) wherewithal of the people who dedicate themselves to this activity. Sure, the vast preponderance of them are wanna-bes, just like anything, but there are quite a few very talented and dedicated people who are just as smart and motivated as the people who are trying to make it impossible for them to do this. Assume that you are smarter than they at your own peril.
2) Anything you can encode into the program itself, is worthless. All these algorithms and reconstructions are pointless, because the hacker has access to it. Don't assume because they don't have the original source that they can't/won't figure it out, it's really not that hard to do if you are dedicated and have some experience.
The only reliable way we know to protect data sent between a secure source (Blizzard's servers) and a non-secure one (your pc), is via some sort of public/private key algorithm. There's a reason your bank doesn't use any of these "xor the 5th bit of the 3rd word of my name with your account number to get some impossible to guess password!!" -- it's because it will be cracked in less than a week no matter how clever for reason (2) above. I actually have no idea how much bnet is involved after the game is started (maybe goes p2p after setup?), so this might not even be a possibility since neither side is secure. In any event, it would almost certainly impact performance in a non-negligible way which is obviously not desirable.
If you want an interesting story of a company who tried to go up against the hackers, implemented a fairly secure key-exchange mechanism, and pretty much finally just gave up - go read about "showeq" (everquest hack to do a very similar thing), Verant/Sony's continued responses, and just how fast after each iteration it was cracked. It will give you a good insight as to exactly how much of the two qualities I outlined in (1) above these people really do have.
Blizzard has chosen a different approach (Warden - process snooping), and perhaps they are wise to do so - even though it pisses me off to end from a privacy point-of-view. Warden does have its weaknesses, as does anything, but it's probably good enough to get the majority, and rest just might be inevitable from a technical point-of-view because of both (1) and (2).+ Show Spoiler +
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as has been said previously, encryption does not address the problem.
the cheats work by directly reading SC2s memory, and can not be caught by either warden (b/c they don't modify SC2 at all, and can hide themselves) or network analysis (no modifications, they just provide additional data to the cheater's eyeballs from outside SC2).
memory obfuscation turns the problem into an arms race. B catches a round of cheaters, the next round of cheats would adapt, B would adapt, repeat. pain in the ass for B but at least cheaters would feel some terror as they would never know when B will adapt.
not sending info to the client which they should not have is a seemingly perfect solution except it has been alleged to scale poorly. i hope some more info about this approach comes out in this thread.
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It's pretty rifdiculous, I could set this up on my comp pretty fast and instantly start doing a lot better on ladder etc.
Maphack and general online play should be disallowed in any major tournament or has Qualifications for said tournaments. Especially because a lot of top players in SC1/sc2 have history of cheating.
I know 99% sure people did use stream information to cheat in Go4/etc tournaments. It's only a matter of time before they switch to maphacks off a second monitor.
It won't help in 40k tournaments but it will help you get invited. Blizzcon is entirely based off ladder position, and just being #1 will get you a lot of invites.
Honestly cheating will only get worse in SC2 and really serious ways to stop said cheating need to happen.
Even "Multi-lans" for larger online tournaments need to happen. AKA lan locations in 3-4 states that you have to show up to to play in the tournament. It's really the only solution, have players in a lan environment with other players watching.
Any online tournaments should not be considered "pure" or "true". Fuck being naive, people will cheat and have cheated, lan should be the only results counted in TLPD etc.
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I really don't mean to be a jerk but part of the reason they might not take you seriously is if you're not messaging them with your native language. You should write out what you want to say and have someone else edit it so you know they have no reason to ignore what you're telling them. I only say this because it's clear that you are good at typing in english but not perfect for punctuation, grammar and spelling. If you need help with any of this just pm me or anyone else who wants to help you. Honestly I don't mean offense by this I just mean to help.
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As far as i know the main MapHack Problem is that the stuff is known by the client, which it "should not" know at all.
Hacking your own Computer isnt really difficult at all, and fighting against this is a uphill fight as its the "hackers" theretory.
However, especially the new Dota games switch to make as much Server sided as possible, as hacking a server is by far more "illegal" and gets you in a world of trouble thats not worth doing it (however might still depend on your country not sure).
But Blizzard just "couldnt" do it that way as that means a lot of traffic on the server, but the worst is they also don't provide some LAN or anything that might give an option for a work around by the community, the player is forced to play with Battlenet , while i know of some "illegal" self made battlenet servers, but currently super unstable.
Still i am sure the community has a lot of talented "white hats" (the good hackers) that help to improve and find problematic holes that "can" be fixed.
Blizzard is really not as superior as some might think, while the game is really awesome, the "support" beside the game is really not good at all.
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I don't think some of you understand where Ashur is coming from.
Back in the old days, when we were writing PenguinPlug, we had support from Blizzard to do it, even up to help they provided with porting it to new patches. Then Blizz was consumed by Activision and some lawyers decided that having any third-party addons to the game is a bad idea. From that point on, the support was cut off (the key moment was, I think, one where Blizz said they'd do their own league frontend instead of endorsing BWLauncher and BWLauncher was removed from the Warden whitelist).
So, some of you saying "come join the good side, fight the hacks" don't understand that there's simply no way for any of us to do such a thing. The only thing we can do is tell Blizzard stuff and then be promptly ignored. Ashur's trying the proof-of-concept thing in order to actually convince Blizzard that cheating is a real issue and not one that is easily taken care of in the current game model.
As for what could work - certainly a server-side model with the game hosted on the server would help, but that would be probably too costly. The on-demand map data transfer would probably require a rewrite of large portions of the game code, but would be more viable - however, it would completely ruin replays as such.
I do believe, however, that the situation is not completely hopless. Currently, Warden already acts as a sort of trojan, scanning the OS for various processes, thus, it can scan for 'external hacks' as well. In fact, most antihack systems (such as PunkBuster) do that. Public banning sessions could simply put the risk of hacking so high that most players would not risk their $40 for the doubtful benefit.
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Oh, and the view some of you here have of our channels of communication with Blizzard are pretty flawed. When Ashur says he "told Blizzard", he doesn't mean he wrote an e-mail to hacks@blizzard.com or a message on the public forums. It means he actually contacted a relevant Blizzard employee who gave him the information.
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conceptually though even with warden you can make one undetectable. I don't think there really is any solution besides going server side, if just for "tournament" matches.
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On October 05 2010 10:32 dacthehork wrote:
conceptually though even with warden you can make one undetectable. I don't think there really is any solution besides going server side, if just for "tournament" matches.
You can, but unless you run every single one of your BW sessions with a debugger on first, you cannot really know if you were detected until you're effectively banned.
It's really a question of cost vs. effect. A working Warden with widespread bannings can deter cheating to the point of non-existence.
It would really help if Blizzard actually made a team of people such as Ashur to proactively search for potential exploits (which I think Ashur is trying to provoke by making threads such as this).
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I have an interesting question on topic.
If Blizzard were to make a gamegaurd that ran before the game launched could it stay active and sniff out the potential invisible hacks? I know they would have to change their ToS and everything allowing them to sniff your PC for 3rd party programs but would it even work and would there be work arounds?
What are Blizzards options?
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Honestly, this is kind of depressing, but it's a truth people should have known in their guts.
I, for one, think they should hire the hackers, similar to how the US government plucks them (and antivirus companies). It'll help clean up their game.
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On October 05 2010 10:51 ZerOsAndOnEs wrote:
I have an interesting question on topic.
If Blizzard were to make a gamegaurd that ran before the game launched could it stay active and sniff out the potential invisible hacks? I know they would have to change their ToS and everything allowing them to sniff your PC for 3rd party programs but would it even work and would there be work arounds?
Basically, that's what Warden already does.
They would only have to change their ToS if they didn't already contain such a section :>
Look over here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=139149
Yes, there still would be workarounds. Basically, Warden can only detect hacks that work in a known way or that it knows about. You can still make a new hack that will not be detected - however, as I noted in the posts above, you would never be certain that at some point it would not get detected and you wouldn't get banned.
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I don't really understand all that but I will say that I played wow for years with warden and it is the only computer game i've ever seen w/o hacks. I know there are bots and things of that nature but I never saw anyone rain down chaos like the do in fps. I just hope that carries over to sc2....
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On October 05 2010 11:52 UnRyValD wrote:
I don't really understand all that but I will say that I played wow for years with warden and it is the only computer game i've ever seen w/o hacks. I know there are bots and things of that nature but I never saw anyone rain down chaos like the do in fps. I just hope that carries over to sc2....
Seems strange, as WoW has "tons" of hacks, just not the way to gain infinited money or something like that, as "bots" use tons of hacks allready, like reading the data of players not visible on the screen and all that kind of stuff.
Its just that a bunch of important values is actual server sided, while for starcraft, nearly "nothing" is server sided at all.
I mean this "GameGuard" stuff is fine, but it will just stop the most basic ways hacking, as anything else will bypass GameGuard anyway and simply ignore it from that on (lots of Proxy Servers etc.).
So what ever you do, anything is at least "something" , if a developer simply ignores hackers, the game is flooded with bots and will just die out, but at the same time, if you "as a player" just ignore hackers, the developer feels less "need" to actual fix problems at all.
As long as you find problems and report them, they can be fixed, some are even "good" for the game as they give you some cool features that even find their way in the next generation of the game, like tons of the replay functions were "hacked" into SC1 allready, and even the "hotkey change" is something everyone is waiting to get from Blizzard, but only the Community was able to really provide it, even the ingame "time" was hacked before, and now everyone has it.
Not everything is evil, theirs a good amount of white hats around that do good for the community, but also black hats that have a bad influence on the community ...
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A really depressing, yet interesting read.
As a "new" starcraft 2 player but long time WoW player, im saddened to read that potential hacking is so hard to fight. Though, I do have hope that a system like Warden would at least discourage the majority of "could-be-hackers" cause of the fear of banning.
Years back, I used a fishing bot for WoW, which got my account banned a few weeks after (along with thousand of other accounts) duo to Warden. This discouraged me from fooling around on my new account (fear of detection), hence I learned my lesson the hard way.
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On October 05 2010 16:02 awha wrote:
A really depressing, yet interesting read.
As a "new" starcraft 2 player but long time WoW player, im saddened to read that potential hacking is so hard to fight. Though, I do have hope that a system like Warden would at least discourage the majority of "could-be-hackers" cause of the fear of banning.
Years back, I used a fishing bot for WoW, which got my account banned a few weeks after (along with thousand of other accounts) duo to Warden. This discouraged me from fooling around on my new account (fear of detection), hence I learned my lesson the hard way.
I wrote an fishbot, There are sources for gathering bot that could even fight aggroed monsters, and guess.. both of those reads memory only and presses your keyboard buttons for you. In case of fishbot, it doesn't read memory, it just reads the screen output. Warden detection? None..
Think, first of you can rename the process to firefox.exe, change its size by modifying resources. Change the resources themselves. So the question is for Warden is, is this a browser or a cheat? And what if the cheat is actually a plugin for firefox.exe, it does not need to be a process at all. If you want to hide such a thing, you simply hide it.
On October 05 2010 11:52 UnRyValD wrote:
I don't really understand all that but I will say that I played wow for years with warden and it is the only computer game i've ever seen w/o hacks. I know there are bots and things of that nature but I never saw anyone rain down chaos like the do in fps. I just hope that carries over to sc2....
I hope the same.
On October 05 2010 09:46 ddrt wrote:
I really don't mean to be a jerk but...
I woudn't use a "jerk" in british english :D Nobody is perfect and sorry if my english is not with absolutely correct grammar, I still hope that you get the point and that it was at least "readable".
On October 05 2010 10:23 Ilintar wrote:
I do believe, however, that the situation is not completely hopless. Currently, Warden already acts as a sort of trojan, scanning the OS for various processes, thus, it can scan for 'external hacks' as well. In fact, most antihack systems (such as PunkBuster) do that. Public banning sessions could simply put the risk of hacking so high that most players would not risk their $40 for the doubtful benefit.
For various processes. Come on.. Look at WoW. WoW is sort of gather-botted. The server doesn't care about x-y-z coords, so you can just change map and walk anywhere (= you can walk underground, noone can kill you). There are so many computers, and so many processes. What way you want to search for them? Process name? That's definitly not enough. Imagine you are Blizzard employee, you cannot ban the person if you are not sure that he/she cheats. And in all those bots readmes is a suggestion to rename the process to blahblahblah.exe. And I know you can still code, so you probably know you can search for the (openprocess) handle in every process (like processexplorer can), but thats also not 100% solution. There are so many programs that simply injects their code/threads into every process. For example Antiviruses open StarCraft in certian cases, some other process might be parent process and so on.
So yeah, you put your game account to a risk. I had 2 WoW accounts, so I tried a little experiment on one what does warden detect on that alt account. Almost 3 months of automatical herb gathering/ fishing (and finished school lesson for computer vision at school) and i still have 2 accounts with plenty of gold. Note the bot for the herbgatherwing wasn't mine, it was public on the net and it _CHANGED_ the WoW memory at one location. So yea, the theory of fear works.. but.. till people find out, that nothing really happens in case you cross the line.
You know, for sure they will scan for the upcomming process "new_external_mh.exe" that will be most popular. But, did you read that thread? Did you see that there is gonna be like four to five of those? That you will have a module/thread somewhere on your pc and that will send the UDP/json files somewhere and that you will see minimap on the iPhone? :D
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Sheesh some people need to relax a bit. OP is not evil... >_>
FYI Anti-virus companies reverse engineer viruses to see how they work so that they detect and remove them.
If the OP was planning on using an undetectable maphack for his own benefit why on earth would he announce it here?
Its because of ppl like him that Blizzard finds vulnerabilities.
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Intesting read... Though, I cant agree with the comparison with WoW other than the structure of the hack. The games are so different in their basic psycology and social psycology, where WoW is basicly driven by ego and greed. Get item x, y and set z, and you are good, that gives you admire from your peer. With the mix of ego and greed grinding WoW is turned out to a grind-marathon for some.
Sure, its not all bad... It have a really good way of implementing team work and rewarding team effort, but thats another story.
I argue that this is not the case for SCII, since the joy of cheating is only found by a minorty. SCII cant be grinded in the same manner, since the reward is (for most) not worth the effort. A cool portrait is cool, but it wont get you to GSL. In the SCII we admire good strategy, where pros/gamers do some really skillfull stuff. That admire cant get cheated too. Therefore I would say that the impact of cheats for SCII would be far less than WoW.
Other than that, as you said, if a cheat need to be compiled 98% of cheaters will not try it out.
Sure it feels like #€(# to get beaten by a cheater, but I find the risk of that happening pretty small. And with the really, really good community of players, a cheater gets picked up pretty fast. (Saw a thread about a maphacker that got banned within days of reveal).
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On October 05 2010 17:30 Grimmy wrote:
FYI Anti-virus companies reverse engineer viruses to see how they work so that they detect and remove them.
I am employee in a one, and... uhm.. we receive like 300 000 new viruses every single day. There is NO WAY how to reverse all of them. But we have the tools that does that for us and 99% of them does the same thing (sending emails, cheking key strokes, ...) and of them have nice comments in the code, like "If you are reading this, I lost the game" :D
On October 05 2010 17:41 Eka wrote:
...basic psycology and social psycology...
You are right. There is no real ladder or tourneys where you can cheat on other players directly. In a case of numbers of various cheats, WoW has soooo many more and Warden is unable to protect the game in a way all of you wish so much.
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Reading this made me think of this
"I bring tidings of doom. I have pierced the veil of the future and beheld only... oblivion."
Good read but a depressing one at that. Thanks for taking the time to write this though.
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On October 05 2010 17:43 Ashur wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2010 17:30 Grimmy wrote:
FYI Anti-virus companies reverse engineer viruses to see how they work so that they detect and remove them.
I am employee in a one, and... uhm.. we receive like 300 000 new viruses every single day. There is NO WAY how to reverse all of them. But we have the tools that does that for us and 99% of them does the same thing (sending emails, cheking key strokes, ...) and of them have nice comments in the code, like "If you are reading this, I lost the game" :D
Most viruses are just variants of existing ones. I talking about ones that actually does something new.
You say you guys never reverse engineer any polymorphic engines / rootkits by hand? O.o Surely they can't be automated
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On October 05 2010 18:40 Grimmy wrote:
Most viruses are just variants of existing ones. I talking about ones that actually does something new.
You say you guys never reverse engineer any polymorphic engines / rootkits by hand? O.o Surely they can't be automated
That something new doesn't occur that often, but yeah, when something shows up.. it definitly takes the attention of our virus analysts.
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On October 05 2010 01:29 FiveOh wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2010 21:21 Ashur wrote:
You might think, that it actually advertise cheats, but truth is that it just describes how the current problematics works and how it worked in SC1...
...So, when SC2 beta came out, I was evil enough to fight for the shadowwalker's glory and research code like mad to finish the maphack as first in the world.
The sources (not just mine) are already published...
Yes, there might be technical argues that you can find the handle in other processes, but... if you think twice.. Blizzard cannot do that because of thousand reasons.
Just in case you are interested in the source codes, feel free to PM me I will guide you. I'm baffled by the positive response this is getting on TL. This thread is absolutely "I've made an undetectable hack look at my e-peen." He openly invites anyone to PM him for a look at his awesome code, and provides no real reason as to why this won't turn out to be the same tug-of-war it has always been (updated hack, updated warden, updated hack and so on). His entire argument is 'trust me guys, this one can't be beat.' I would understand if this were a report on new hacking methods ( made by someone other than the OP) and what could potentially by done about them. As it stands, what does this add to the community other than inflating the OP's ego? I think its particularly appalling that he can openly state that he has published his maphack code. This is attention whoring at its worst.
Completely agree. I see shit posts like this all the time on various FPS forums. Some self-righteous asshat will come and post a topic, admitting he makes hacks, making the topic just to get a reaction and an ego boost. It's simply a veiled attention grab, nothing more.
What's even more familiar is the "I messaged the developer with information and they didn't care, so I decided to make/release a hack. I sure showed them. God, I'm so smart."
I wouldn't mind this topic, if you didn't openly advertise that you have attempted making the first maphack for SC2 (I bet your parents are proud *applaud*) and then freely give out the source code. What are you accomplishing by releasing the source code?
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Very informative. I'm not eager to run into cheaters, but this way of being informed helps me a lot. Good read, though its topic is pretty sad.
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Very good read. Any advice on the brand of whiskey we should drink?
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I have yet to hear an argument against them importing a serversided -what data should be available for client- system. Apperently HoN and LoL have this system already.
Why did you not respond on my comments Ashur?
The argument of implementing this being "hard" sounds like bullocks to me since Blizzard can afford the best programmers.
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On October 05 2010 18:57 Angry_Fetus wrote:
Completely agree. I see shit posts like this all the time on various FPS forums. Some self-righteous asshat will come and post a topic, admitting he makes hacks, making the topic just to get a reaction and an ego boost. It's simply a veiled attention grab, nothing more.
What's even more familiar is the "I messaged the developer with information and they didn't care, so I decided to make/release a hack. I sure showed them. God, I'm so smart."
I wouldn't mind this topic, if you didn't openly advertise that you have attempted making the first maphack for SC2 (I bet your parents are proud *applaud*) and then freely give out the source code. What are you accomplishing by releasing the source code?
It seems you just tried to give offence and throw your hatred based on reality ignorance with insults (asshat, parents, arrogance) on my head. I don't want to be part of such a thing, so I will just let it be.. I might say that post such as this shoudn't be tolerated at those forums, because they bring just a flame to the discussion.
Anyways, to answer your question I can only suggest you to read the topic again properly, because the *answer is already written in one of replies. Note that the source I am privately linking is not mine. It's the bad guys who found the way themselves and published it and cooperate on it in an approx. group of ten. Most of the people are programmers-beginners, that are interested in how does the mechanism work and how it can be countered. Hope this explanation helped you a bit.
*answer link: + Show Spoiler +
On October 05 2010 19:47 Uriel_SVK wrote:
Very good read. Any advice on the brand of whiskey we should drink?
Pick one from the Islay distilleries
On October 05 2010 20:26 bbsss wrote:
I have yet to hear an argument against them importing a serversided -what data should be available for client- system. Apperently HoN and LoL have this system already.
Sorry I am flooded by messages a bit. As Ilintar already wrote that you can choose between two main things. One of them is that everything is stored clientside which gives you good performance and replays (current SC2 solution), or on the other hand (HoN solution) everything serverside, which would bring some problems. It is nearly impossible to (re)implement for so many objects that StarCraft 2 have to handle (HoN is a game with ~ten objects), StarCraft got thousands. In addition StarCraft have got amazing map editor, where you can change almost every single rule how the game really works, and thats the other problem, because how do you know what the server should hide and show in custom maps? It would require some HW, which is actually not so big problem for such a company. If you ask what else can be done to stop such a cheat, I must say... I don't know. Seriously no idea. It was bad Blizzard guys knew that its flawed in this way (and yes, they really did know that during the beta, guys at anticheat dept. are not that stupid to find it on their own, so they basically knew it in even during concept of StarCraft 2), but sadly, they didn't do anything to prevent it because of performace issues.
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I trust the Warden. I played WC3 for 6 years, and even last year, the Warden was still working pretty fine on ladder games.
In WC3, it wasn't possible to maphack due to warden in the ladder, but everyone maphacked in custom games despite the Warden. So i don't have much knowledge of how it works, but the warden worked perfectly on the ladder but was garbage on custom games.
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"So i don't have much knowledge of how it works, but the warden worked perfectly on the ladder..."
ignorance may be bliss, but the point of this thread is to point out that cheating is undetectable.
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Consider a genetic program for detection of memory reading processes.
It in theory should be possible to detect code that is looking at star2's memory, and should be possible to distinguish between the habits of virus scanners and hacks. This would probably require considerable effort.
Examples from literature
1
2
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On October 05 2010 20:26 Ashur wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2010 20:26 bbsss wrote:
I have yet to hear an argument against them importing a serversided -what data should be available for client- system. Apperently HoN and LoL have this system already.
Sorry I am flooded by messages a bit. As Ilintar already wrote that you can choose between two main things. One of them is that everything is stored clientside which gives you good performance and replays (current SC2 solution), or on the other hand (HoN solution) everything serverside, which would bring some problems. It is nearly impossible to (re)implement for so many objects that StarCraft 2 have to handle (HoN is a game with ~ten objects), StarCraft got thousands. In addition StarCraft have got amazing map editor, where you can change almost every single rule how the game really works, and thats the other problem, because how do you know what the server should hide and show in custom maps? It would require some HW, which is actually not so big problem for such a company. If you ask what else can be done to stop such a cheat, I must say... I don't know. Seriously no idea. It was bad Blizzard guys knew that its flawed in this way (and yes, they really did know that during the beta, guys at anticheat dept. are not that stupid to find it on their own, so they basically knew it in even during concept of StarCraft 2), but sadly, they didn't do anything to prevent it because of performace issues.
So argument one is good performance; I don't see how serverside handling would in any way reduce the performance clientside. Increase in serverload, so what.
The other is comparing the amount of objects between hon and starcraft. It's not as if this has to be manually converted or am I mistaken
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"It in theory should be possible to detect code that is looking at star2's memory"
actually no, this is not true. windows does not give us a way to stop, or to even be aware, that another process is reading your memory.
the papers you linked to are neat but deal with the detection of intrusion into networked systems, not relevant to our problem.
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On October 05 2010 19:47 Uriel_SVK wrote:
Very good read. Any advice on the brand of whiskey we should drink?
I find Johnny Walker Black Label to be quite good, Jack Daniels Single Barrel is also good if a bit heavier.
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This is somewhat unrelated to the OP as I don't even play SC2.
I wanted to thank Ashur and Ilintar for their work on BW while they were active though! You guys did amazing work and I wish you and rest of the programmers had continued with the awesome tools and creative ideas.
I hope Blizzard hires you guys sometime, even if it's only on a case by case basis to help them with shit, and if you don't know how... you'll have a challenge!
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It really sucks that there's apparently no way to win the battle
If the law wasn't preventing it, would there be some way to stop these hacks that isn't too extreme?
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i didnt understand a thing you said but it still made me sad that there will be maphacks in sc2
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On October 06 2010 03:51 Ilintar wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2010 19:47 Uriel_SVK wrote:
Very good read. Any advice on the brand of whiskey we should drink? I find Johnny Walker Black Label to be quite good, Jack Daniels Single Barrel is also good if a bit heavier.
I'm sorry. The scotch snob got me all worked up to respond to this.
Stay AWAY from blended scotch. Single-malt is your best friend:
Glenlivet 12yo (light body, most mainstream of all, fruity and awesome)
Balvenie 12yo
Cragganmore 15yo (VERY smooth!)
Macallan
Highland Park
Glenfiddich
Start with these. They all generally cost $35-55 for 750ml and are commonly found in liquor stores worth their salt.
Try different scotch from different areas of scotland- Highland, Lowlands, Speyside (my fav), Islay, etc...
Ditch blended Johnny Walker crap out of it. Jack Daniels is not a scotch, it's a mere whiskey. Scotch by definition is whiskey that comes from Scotland, just like Cognac comes from Cognac, France and rest are just Brandy.
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Intel's "Walled Garden" approach might work here, but that is hardware that only runs signed code; So it would be like an Apple Store approach where all programs usable must be approved and get signature first. So if you want to run a secure system with limited programs, you'd choose the walled garden (and Blizzard would have to only make it's program operable on it), and if you want to run independant or homebrewed programs you'd have to run on other archetectures. This is years down the road though and likely not to be adopted by the general public, just corporations sensitive systems, defense and infrastructure. (Unless you were like Stuxnet devs and physically broke into Blizzard's compound and stole their digital signature)
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/09/intels-walled-garden-plan-to-put-av-vendors-out-of-business.ars
I think Ashur might be right. They would need (if they don't have one already) a cell team to be actively fingerprinting the existing and emerging hacks that come out to make any other approach be somewhat effective. (And I only mean effective enough to keep the general public appeased... as there could/will still be a few hackers out there with unique fingerprints that will slip through, but if they ever get big in tournaments, the community could likely spot them and call them out, that's where the Entropians come in ^^)
ArghUScaredMe, I know the general consensus among scotch enthusiasts is to go single malt; however, I do have an affinity for the blended JWB and Johny Walker Blue instead. I like the kick of Black Label over the smoother and different taste of single malt, personally. And while Blue can be a lot smoother (although it is not consistant as many of it's ingrediant manufacturers are out of business) it still has that special zing to it =)
Ilintar, I do like Single Barrel, but personally find Gentleman Jack my preference as far as bourbon goes. (For arghUScaredMe, If JD had 1% less Indian corn it would be considered a Bourbon, but JD proudly keeps it a "Tennessee Whiskey")
I've tried Brandy once, and I thought it was horrible. Anyone have any good labels? (Please post something productive to the OP before answering my drinking questions in the same post; as not to get us off track =-P)
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Yikes @ "Walled Garden" - it's a complete change at how a computer is used. Only programs approved by one of the "authorities" would be able to run...an entirely different world from our computers now where the computer user (well, admin I guess) can choose whatever he/she wants to run.
And it's interesting how all SC2's traffic must inconveniently go through Blizzard's servers, but lacks the usual anti-hack benefit that such a system provides, since computation is still done client side.
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On October 05 2010 20:26 Ashur wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2010 19:47 Uriel_SVK wrote:
Very good read. Any advice on the brand of whiskey we should drink? Pick one from the Islay distilleries
You have good taste!
As someone who does quite a bit of programming, I understand the curiosity that drives people to do this, but as a gamer, I am very sad that people take away the fair play and innocence that make games like SC2 great.
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On October 06 2010 01:46 bbsss wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2010 20:26 Ashur wrote:On October 05 2010 20:26 bbsss wrote:
I have yet to hear an argument against them importing a serversided -what data should be available for client- system. Apperently HoN and LoL have this system already.
Sorry I am flooded by messages a bit. As Ilintar already wrote that you can choose between two main things. One of them is that everything is stored clientside which gives you good performance and replays (current SC2 solution), or on the other hand (HoN solution) everything serverside, which would bring some problems. It is nearly impossible to (re)implement for so many objects that StarCraft 2 have to handle (HoN is a game with ~ten objects), StarCraft got thousands. In addition StarCraft have got amazing map editor, where you can change almost every single rule how the game really works, and thats the other problem, because how do you know what the server should hide and show in custom maps? It would require some HW, which is actually not so big problem for such a company. If you ask what else can be done to stop such a cheat, I must say... I don't know. Seriously no idea. It was bad Blizzard guys knew that its flawed in this way (and yes, they really did know that during the beta, guys at anticheat dept. are not that stupid to find it on their own, so they basically knew it in even during concept of StarCraft 2), but sadly, they didn't do anything to prevent it because of performace issues. So argument one is good performance; I don't see how serverside handling would in any way reduce the performance clientside. Increase in serverload, so what. The other is comparing the amount of objects between hon and starcraft. It's not as if this has to be manually converted or am I mistaken
Serverside handling would result in massive amounts of lag, which is the performance he speaks of.
The server would have to keep track of each individual thing on the map. Can you imagine how much more laggy it would be if the servers suddenly had to manage several hundred times more information than what they currently do?
There are also other issues with it. For example, in HoN the pudge-like character that has the hook, if he casts the hook and it goes towards a player, then the player that cant see pudge sees the hook always come from the SW corner of the game regardless of where it actually came from. He cant interpret where he really is because the game cant handle what it doesnt see.
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On October 05 2010 20:26 bbsss wrote:
I have yet to hear an argument against them importing a serversided -what data should be available for client- system. Apperently HoN and LoL have this system already.
Why did you not respond on my comments Ashur?
The argument of implementing this being "hard" sounds like bullocks to me since Blizzard can afford the best programmers.
"have yet to hear"
it has been explained 5000 times already, even in this very thread
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FOr the encryption people....
WAY back in the Everquest days there was a program called ShowEQ. When it first came out, the datastream was essentially unencrypted, so a user of the program could sniff out in the packets what creatures were spawned, where they were, etc. It flourished in Linux, undetectable, until someone ported it to Windows to run in tandem with the EQ client. Then Sony started searching for the ShowEQ executable, ala Warden today. Mass bannings happened.
But the linux people lived on, and IIRC a windows verson came out which allowed the remote packet sniffing of Linux. ShowEQ florished.
Sony encrypted the datastream.
Hackers learnt where the decryption code was in memory. Import the decryption routine in ShowEQ, hack once again worked.
It turned into a back and forth battle...they'd try to kill it off, the hackers found a new way to do it.
We're basically in the same boat here...all the info that is needed is in the datastream during a match. Sure, its probably encrypted, but if someone puts forth enough effort they'll figure out how to watch the stream...on another PC...which is undetectable in every way by Blizzard. Shit, it would be undetectable in any situation except (obviously) a live tournament.
THere's money involved in this....so it WILL happen. Its just a matter of when.
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On October 07 2010 06:13 TheRabidDeer wrote:Show nested quote +On October 06 2010 01:46 bbsss wrote:On October 05 2010 20:26 Ashur wrote:On October 05 2010 20:26 bbsss wrote:
I have yet to hear an argument against them importing a serversided -what data should be available for client- system. Apperently HoN and LoL have this system already.
Sorry I am flooded by messages a bit. As Ilintar already wrote that you can choose between two main things. One of them is that everything is stored clientside which gives you good performance and replays (current SC2 solution), or on the other hand (HoN solution) everything serverside, which would bring some problems. It is nearly impossible to (re)implement for so many objects that StarCraft 2 have to handle (HoN is a game with ~ten objects), StarCraft got thousands. In addition StarCraft have got amazing map editor, where you can change almost every single rule how the game really works, and thats the other problem, because how do you know what the server should hide and show in custom maps? It would require some HW, which is actually not so big problem for such a company. If you ask what else can be done to stop such a cheat, I must say... I don't know. Seriously no idea. It was bad Blizzard guys knew that its flawed in this way (and yes, they really did know that during the beta, guys at anticheat dept. are not that stupid to find it on their own, so they basically knew it in even during concept of StarCraft 2), but sadly, they didn't do anything to prevent it because of performace issues. So argument one is good performance; I don't see how serverside handling would in any way reduce the performance clientside. Increase in serverload, so what. The other is comparing the amount of objects between hon and starcraft. It's not as if this has to be manually converted or am I mistaken Serverside handling would result in massive amounts of lag, which is the performance he speaks of. The server would have to keep track of each individual thing on the map. Can you imagine how much more laggy it would be if the servers suddenly had to manage several hundred times more information than what they currently do? There are also other issues with it. For example, in HoN the pudge-like character that has the hook, if he casts the hook and it goes towards a player, then the player that cant see pudge sees the hook always come from the SW corner of the game regardless of where it actually came from. He cant interpret where he really is because the game cant handle what it doesnt see.
Your example is not true, HoN handles hooks comming from an previously unknown source just fine?
I'm pretty sure the server already does keep track of every unit on the map. Leaving how the game runs for the client to decide will introduce some big problems. So once again you give the argument of increased serverload, but I say this can not be a good reason since I can only imagine the extra load to outweigh the problems it causes (maphack). With my knowledge I'd say that a solution like the one I propose might cost some extra programming time, but not so much serverload that it would be more crippling than having hackers.
I can see the problem it would pose for custom games and what should be visible and not. But this could be so easily bypassed (just give an ability to bypass the -lets call it a fow-check- and custom games will be fine).
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Why does Blizzard have to be reactionary to the Op and people like him. Awesome! you can find a way to do this or that in the game and Blizzard makes it so easy that it's not even a challenge with your leet hacking skills. There are other things you can do with that talent you have besides taunting a company into thinking they have to one up you when in reality all they have to do is wait a couple months and then ban your ass so you give them another 60 dollars or just move on to something more "challenging."
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I think the easiest answer that they wont make it server sided is that they also have a Singleplayer.
Overall Multiplayer works the same as Singleplayer, just that the data is exchanged, but the basic "module" of the game works as it is.
So if they would totally change this module for multiplayer, its just extra development cost, while its so much easier to produce a singel "game module" that works for single AND multiplayer the same way.
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On October 07 2010 07:44 bbsss wrote:
Leaving how the game runs for the client to decide will introduce some big problems.
Such as?
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On October 07 2010 06:47 samalie wrote:
FOr the encryption people....
WAY back in the Everquest days there was a program called ShowEQ. When it first came out, the datastream was essentially unencrypted, so a user of the program could sniff out in the packets what creatures were spawned, where they were, etc. It flourished in Linux, undetectable, until someone ported it to Windows to run in tandem with the EQ client. Then Sony started searching for the ShowEQ executable, ala Warden today. Mass bannings happened.
But the linux people lived on, and IIRC a windows verson came out which allowed the remote packet sniffing of Linux. ShowEQ florished.
Sony encrypted the datastream.
Hackers learnt where the decryption code was in memory. Import the decryption routine in ShowEQ, hack once again worked.
It turned into a back and forth battle...they'd try to kill it off, the hackers found a new way to do it.
We're basically in the same boat here...all the info that is needed is in the datastream during a match. Sure, its probably encrypted, but if someone puts forth enough effort they'll figure out how to watch the stream...on another PC...which is undetectable in every way by Blizzard. Shit, it would be undetectable in any situation except (obviously) a live tournament.
THere's money involved in this....so it WILL happen. Its just a matter of when.
Intesting read.
Though, I cant see that "ther's money involved". I have trouble seeing that alot of players would pay for a cheat in SCII, mainly cuz its not driven by the same psycology as for example WoW or EQ. Sure, the world has some black sheeps here and there. But saying that there is money in it is kind of an small "overstatement". IMHO atleast.
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On October 05 2010 17:27 Ashur wrote:
Think, first of you can rename the process to firefox.exe, change its size by modifying resources. Change the resources themselves. So the question is for Warden is, is this a browser or a cheat? And what if the cheat is actually a plugin for firefox.exe, it does not need to be a process at all. If you want to hide such a thing, you simply hide it.
Well yes I'm pretty confident you can do all of this, but your average cheater joe can't.
If you release a hack publicly 99% of the ppl using it will not be able to prevent the Warden from detecting it, effectively making the hack obsolete except for a handful of individuals who aren't competitive enough at starcraft to make a difference in online money tournaments.
Or am I mistaken?
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On October 07 2010 18:32 Klumaster wrote:Show nested quote +On October 07 2010 07:44 bbsss wrote:
Leaving how the game runs for the client to decide will introduce some big problems. Such as?
Speedhack.
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On October 07 2010 20:56 bbsss wrote:Show nested quote +On October 07 2010 18:32 Klumaster wrote:On October 07 2010 07:44 bbsss wrote:
Leaving how the game runs for the client to decide will introduce some big problems. Such as? Speedhack.
As in, units moving at a different speed? If one player's game allows them to do something that the other player's machine doesn't see happening, you just get a desync.
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On October 07 2010 21:04 Klumaster wrote:Show nested quote +On October 07 2010 20:56 bbsss wrote:On October 07 2010 18:32 Klumaster wrote:On October 07 2010 07:44 bbsss wrote:
Leaving how the game runs for the client to decide will introduce some big problems. Such as? Speedhack. As in, units moving at a different speed? If one player's game allows them to do something that the other player's machine doesn't see happening, you just get a desync.
Which client would decide who is right?
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Obviously, this fault exists in practically any client sided game, but I think what the OP trying to say is that special attention should be given to it in Starcraft 2 because money will be on the line alot of the time, therefore bringing hacking during tournament games to the same level as lets say cheating in a Casino. You are commiting Fraud when prize money is involved? and probably breaking Blizzards TOS by doing this. To be honest though, during any tournament where money is involved, replays should be analysed and people should be willing to be transparent about the setup of their computers to an extent.
Obviously, to the average casual player trying to make his way up the ladder, "secret" hacks like this if they become common are doing to lead to frustration, annoyance and maybe even the quitting of the game, IE, not buying the expansions when they come out. Blizzard need the expansions to sell well, they are designed to help pay for the servers and other things which will be costing them after the games initial release. If there is widespread anger amongst gamers, people aren't going to give Blizzard more money, and then they will have to spend time attempting to fix this.
Blizzard probably ignored your email because they didn't want to be seen getting help from someone outside of their company who isn't respected, or they have been told they are not allowed too. They knew about this weakness from their other games, but Client to Server just wouldn't work for Starcraft. Over the past 10 years, the abilities of computers have come alot further than the abilities of most peoples internet connections. You would be passing so much data between Client and Server, and server would need its own time to do its thing. Your putting a third party inbetween your link, which slows everything down. This third party is just another thing which could have problems or not be reliable.
Imagine this: If the server goes down: Who wins the match ?
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Noone wins the match, it will be a Tie or both lose I don't remember exactly(remember battlenet going down several times during the beta?). I would like to hear from someone who actually knows how this game runs. Because I'm pretty sure there all data goes through the server, and implementng so that the data that runs through the server is filtered for both clients wouldnt cost shit for serverload or performance drop client sided.
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It's not just a question of filtering though. The minute you don't have full data on the client, you have to run the actual game simulation on the server too.
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Of course, what I've found surprising is that on client based models there's never been random auditing.
In a lot of applications (Finding peaks and shortest paths), random sampling works well. Likewise, if the server *randomly* ran some of the calculations to validate against client behavior, couldn't it detect cheaters? This could even be randomly elected subsets of units upon the start of a game (I.E., each unit spawned has a 5% chance to have all its calculations done on the server side, in addition to client side). For the clients, they keep chugging away on calculating this 5% of units, but if the server detects a deviation from expected or allowed parameters, it's overrrr.
Sure, for a few games it's possible that a cheater wouldn't be detected, but as the number of games goes up, the probability of not being detected goes down...
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I think the thing there is that no serverside verification is needed - if someone cheats at one end, the game just goes unstable and the game ends. Though it would be good if something could verify whose machine was misbehaving, it's not needed to prevent cheating. The problem here is that once you've got the simulation running on the client, the data can be extracted without client behaviour changing.
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On October 05 2010 20:29 Anfere wrote:
I trust the Warden. I played WC3 for 6 years, and even last year, the Warden was still working pretty fine on ladder games.
i played wc3 aswell and there was a lot of cheating in it, mostly really awful things like drophacks.
Shortly before sc2 released i started to play a bit of ladder again, encountered 2 guys that made my screen freeze every 2 seconds and finally lagged out themselves and 2 goldhackers in the first 20 games. i immediately quit again.
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Ashur is the typical story of a villain who was once a good guy.
Was awesome, got traumatized for some reason, turned depressed, started behaving auto-destructive by doing bad things to things he loves.
Thank you Ashur for all the good stuff you did before. I hope you get better and become the positive figure in the community again.
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On October 13 2010 03:12 niteReloaded wrote:
Ashur is the typical story of a villain who was once a good guy.
Was awesome, got traumatized for some reason, turned depressed, started behaving auto-destructive by doing bad things to things he loves.
Thank you Ashur for all the good stuff you did before. I hope you get better and become the positive figure in the community again.
Did you not read anything he has written in this thread? He's basically making the hacks to show blizzard that there is still exploits in the game so they can get on top of this and fix it already. He's tried already to speak to blizzard and they just keep turning their backs on him. So he's doing what needs to be done in order for blizzard to realize what is going to happen very soon. He's still fighting on the good side, but doing it as a "bad guy."
Ashur and Ili, I've always trusted you both either way when it comes to the community. Let's hope there is something that can be done about this, if not, here goes to another game ruined. /cheers 
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On October 13 2010 03:12 niteReloaded wrote:
Ashur is the typical story of a villain who was once a good guy.
Was awesome, got traumatized for some reason, turned depressed, started behaving auto-destructive by doing bad things to things he loves.
Thank you Ashur for all the good stuff you did before. I hope you get better and become the positive figure in the community again.
Wow, I think you read wayyy too much into this stuff...
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Just get to high level diamond and don't worry about it. 95% of players at the top level (read: anyone playing in top tournaments and especially LANs) aren't going to be using maphacks because they actually want to be good. Plus, the more you worry about shit you can't control the more you're going to blame your losses on maphacks when you just got outplayed.
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While I am sad about the existance of hacks and depressed at the thought of seeing more of them in the future, I've got to say I am wholly unsurprised as well.
The hacks/scandals of the past few months like drophack and Immortal warp-in I read about already gave me the impression Blizzard did not take the security of their game serious enough.
As for Ashur posting this, it has long been established in online games of any kind that companies - who need to think economically - will only exert themselves to fix exploits and hacks when they become numerous and/or very publicly known.
Its is a lesson I always assumed everyone knew from way back in the old DrTwister days, but instead it seems this needs to be relearned every few years...
So in short, if one encounters a working hack or exploit, the best thing to get it fixed FAST is to not use it yourself but instead make it public so the numbers of it being used skyrocket and the compamy is forced to do something about it. It also serves to get some of the idiots banned who jump up on a public hack/exploit bandwagon
However, if I understand Ashur correctly - and I am by no means a programmer myself - then the issue is a lot more grave this time, because there probably will not be a thing Blizzard can do about it ?
Maybe thats correct, maybe not - but especially if a coming hack will be undetectable, it is very important that the customers know about it and Blizzard does not get to pretend nothing's amiss.
I do not know what amount of server infrastructure and cash would be needed to run things server-side like in HoN, but I DO know that I'd much prefer to pay a monthly fee like in MMORPG games for them to be able to keep things as cheating-free as possible as opposed to play for free on a hacked ladder.
So if things are indeed as grim as predicted by Ashur, then the Sc2 community will have to ask what we want and maybe ask Blizzard what they can do to ensure a continued and enjoyable gaming experience - and we should preferably ask them before we buy two more expansions.
To me at least the multi-player part of Sc2 is the reason i want to buy the expansions, and I'd really like to know the ladder wont become a farce for being a hack-fest before I shell out the money for them.
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
On October 06 2010 06:31 ArghUScaredMe wrote:Show nested quote +On October 06 2010 03:51 Ilintar wrote:On October 05 2010 19:47 Uriel_SVK wrote:
Very good read. Any advice on the brand of whiskey we should drink? I find Johnny Walker Black Label to be quite good, Jack Daniels Single Barrel is also good if a bit heavier. I'm sorry. The scotch snob got me all worked up to respond to this. Stay AWAY from blended scotch. Single-malt is your best friend: Glenlivet 12yo (light body, most mainstream of all, fruity and awesome) Balvenie 12yo Cragganmore 15yo (VERY smooth!) Macallan Highland Park Glenfiddich Start with these. They all generally cost $35-55 for 750ml and are commonly found in liquor stores worth their salt. Try different scotch from different areas of scotland- Highland, Lowlands, Speyside (my fav), Islay, etc... Ditch blended Johnny Walker crap out of it. Jack Daniels is not a scotch, it's a mere whiskey. Scotch by definition is whiskey that comes from Scotland, just like Cognac comes from Cognac, France and rest are just Brandy.
haha gotta agree with this
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honestly, if your playing a map hacker, its obvious, even if warden cant read it, you surely can if you look at the rep
report to blizzard, and the dude will eventually get a ban, he's then forced to buy the game again. its not like sc1 where you can just make a new account. hackers who get caught arent likely to re offend cuz theyve gotta buy the game again.
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On October 13 2010 03:45 ShoCkeyy wrote:Show nested quote +On October 13 2010 03:12 niteReloaded wrote:
Ashur is the typical story of a villain who was once a good guy.
Was awesome, got traumatized for some reason, turned depressed, started behaving auto-destructive by doing bad things to things he loves.
Thank you Ashur for all the good stuff you did before. I hope you get better and become the positive figure in the community again. Did you not read anything he has written in this thread? He's basically making the hacks to show blizzard that there is still exploits in the game so they can get on top of this and fix it already. He's tried already to speak to blizzard and they just keep turning their backs on him. So he's doing what needs to be done in order for blizzard to realize what is going to happen very soon. He's still fighting on the good side, but doing it as a "bad guy." Ashur and Ili, I've always trusted you both either way when it comes to the community. Let's hope there is something that can be done about this, if not, here goes to another game ruined. /cheers
Disagree.
He knows this can't be fixed the way it is, so he's releasing the source to 'whoever is interested'. To the people who asked him how he suggest to fix it, he replies 'start drinking like the rest of us'. He admits this can't be fixed without basically redoing the game.
If you still believe he's helping, how about I said that the talibans helped the US national security by pointing out the flaws by crashing the towers of 9-11?
Ashur's act can only speed up the arrival of the hacks, and all he gets out of it is a few "i first told you so"s when it actually happens.
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What about encrypting every transmitted information in the fog of war with multiple keys that only the server has ?
Let me elaborate :
- The problem here is that wathever the way the information are saved in the client memory, if sc2 can access it, a cheat can too. You can change the encryption method or the location of those information with each patch, it'll only make the work to hack it back again a little harder.
- The solution recognized as the ultimate one, is to simply not transmit any information to the client if it's in the fog of war. But it will probably never be used because of the potential lags that will arize when you'll need to reveal a lot of information at a time.
What i propose :
We know that the client must have all the information of the map transmitted constantly, because it's easier to have replays this way, and it avoids any lag in case of "mass reveal" (a scan). So, why not encrypt any fog of war data with a key unknown to the client and transmit it when a scan is needed ?
To do things right, the key must change as soon as it's used once. With this, a cheat program could only have "screenshots" for each scan, but nothing in real time.
You could even do a better job by having an encryption key for each region of a "virtual" grid map, determined with some probabilistic presence functions (you don't need a complete region for a outerspace zone where nobody ever go). For example, separate the map in 10 regions, and have 10 keys corresponding. After a scan, only the key of one region (or more if no luck) is transmitted.
The sc2 client will only display the last state it has and save this key for later purpose, while a cheat program will also know the past that led to this state, which is completely useless.
At the end of the game, every keys are transmitted at once, so each client can have his replay.
Incidentally, blizzard could add an option where you could refuse to transmit the keys concerning your own fog of war, not allowing your opponent to have a complete replay, and thus disallowing him to brag that he successfully cheesed a TL member while having only 500 in diamond
It requires a good encryption algorithm, sufficiently long to break without a key to not allow an on the fly brute force, but for wich it is easy and fast to generate a bunch of keys.
So, can it works, or am i completely wrong here by missing an obvious point ?
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Croatia9509 Posts
On October 13 2010 06:18 niteReloaded wrote:Show nested quote +On October 13 2010 03:45 ShoCkeyy wrote:On October 13 2010 03:12 niteReloaded wrote:
Ashur is the typical story of a villain who was once a good guy.
Was awesome, got traumatized for some reason, turned depressed, started behaving auto-destructive by doing bad things to things he loves.
Thank you Ashur for all the good stuff you did before. I hope you get better and become the positive figure in the community again. Did you not read anything he has written in this thread? He's basically making the hacks to show blizzard that there is still exploits in the game so they can get on top of this and fix it already. He's tried already to speak to blizzard and they just keep turning their backs on him. So he's doing what needs to be done in order for blizzard to realize what is going to happen very soon. He's still fighting on the good side, but doing it as a "bad guy." Ashur and Ili, I've always trusted you both either way when it comes to the community. Let's hope there is something that can be done about this, if not, here goes to another game ruined. /cheers Disagree. He knows this can't be fixed the way it is, so he's releasing the source to 'whoever is interested'. To the people who asked him how he suggest to fix it, he replies 'start drinking like the rest of us'. He admits this can't be fixed without basically redoing the game. If you still believe he's helping, how about I said that the talibans helped the US national security by pointing out the flaws by crashing the towers of 9-11? Ashur's act can only speed up the arrival of the hacks, and all he gets out of it is a few "i first told you so"s when it actually happens.
Hmm, you're spewing a lot of nonsense without actually reading the whole thread. First of all, Ashur is not sending HIS source to whoever is interested. He's sending a source that other people made to people who are interested in hacking. Notice word hacking, not cheating. Of course, some "kiddies" would want to use this to cheat, but that's why Ashur's sending the sources which 99,9% of those kiddies doesn't even know how to compile.
And about his advice that we can just start drinking beer (which is a damn good advice, I might add), is that this is a pretty helpless situation. But will this impact SC2's success or competition in any meaningful way? Remains to be seen, but based on BW's history, unlikely.
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