Subverting the World Of Warcraft API

Presented at DEF CON 17 (2009), July 31, 2009, 2 p.m. (50 minutes)

The authors will demonstrate how to work within the World of Warcraft API framework to re-enable the features of protected and disabled functions. They will explain their library and how to use it to get around the restrictions on programmatically casting spells, targeting, moving, and performing those actions in response to UI events. What's more, they will use this library to do a live demonstration of this code autonomously playing battlegrounds. This talk will include a description of how their library works with example source, how you can download and use the code, and how to get involved with the community developing this code. All tools will be released the day of the talk, and source will be release under the GPL3 license. In true DEF CON fashion the authors will talk about the problem they were trying to solve, demonstrate the break on the security system, demonstrate the code in action, and release the tools. If you're a hacker, you're going to love this talk. If you're a developer, you're going to love this talk. If you're a gamer, your going to love this talk. If you're a hacker, a developer, and a gamer, you cannot afford to miss this.


Presenters:

  • James Luedke - Software Engineer, Project DoD Inc.
    James Luedke is a professional software developer that has contributed to several open source projects including Gearman and Drizzle. He has also been a key contributor to Project DoD. A software engineer for 10+ years, his professional interests and expertise include distributed computing, high-volume messaging, and clustering. In his spare time, James has hacked on Blizzard's WoW API and co-authored the BTP library, which can be used to automate tasks and actions in the game.
  • Christopher Mooney - Software Engineer, Project DoD Inc.
    Christopher Mooney is a software engineer that works in the high performance and high availability problem space. He has a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics at the University of Southern Maine. He is a key contributor on Project DoD Inc., a 501(c)(3) charitable technology nonprofit, where he works on systems engineering. He has always been interested in computer security problems, and has focused a good deal of time on cryptology and computer security research. To find out more information about Christopher Mooney you can visit his web page at: https://chris.dod.net/. In 2005 Chris picked up a copy of World of Warcraft as a way to blow off some steam and keep in touch with long distance friends. He was instantly mesmerized by the rich API Blizzard provided, and went on to write some small addons that would later snowball into tens of thousands of lines of code. He played the game on and off for years in his spare time, all the while working with James Luedke to create some interesting autonomous agent code, and some heuristic spell casting functions for various classes. When a great deal of this code was disabled by the 2.0 patch back in November of 2007, Chris and James started working on a library that would restore the games original functionality. That library is the feature of his 2009 DEF CON talk.

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