engleski

Reverse Engineering of the MMORPG Client Protocol

Massively Multi-Player On-Line Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) represent a computer game genre where the human player is able to assume the role of a game character and control its actions in a well defined virtual world ; the prefix “massively” denoting the vast number of players playing the game simultaneously. Cheating in such games is a fairly common occurrence and presents a major concern in network games as it is able to degrade the experience of “honest” players, with cheat prevention being considered as a subset of security issues for online games. In this paper we have presented a form of a network-level game cheating based on the MMORPG client reverse engineering method within the game Mana World, an MMORPG with client/server architecture. We have used the network protocol vulnerability of a nonencrypted data traffic in order to reverse- engineer the original data packets sent by the original game client, and replicated these packets in our own AI-based game client which enabled us complete control of the game character via Python code.

reverse engineering ; mmorpg ; network protocol ; computer games ; cheating ; security

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