1. InfoconDB
  2. DEF CON
  3. DEF CON 18 (2010)
  4. Kartograph : Finding a Needle in a Haystack or How to Apply Reverse Engineering Techniques to Cheat at Video Games

Kartograph : Finding a Needle in a Haystack or How to Apply Reverse Engineering Techniques to Cheat at Video Games

Presented at DEF CON 18 (2010), Aug. 1, 2010, 3 p.m. (50 minutes).

While we were slaving away hacking an awesome memory analysis tool, Kartograph, our lazy graduate student friends next door were busy honing their skills in CIV 4, Age of Empire III, Anno, C&C, and WarCraft III. They did not anticipate that we could use Kartograph to own them in these games. This talk shows how we turned the tables on them by using Kartograph to build 0-day cheats. Kartograph is a tool designed to reverse-engineer the memory structure of games, applying analysis and visualization techniques to find small chunks of valuable information within large process footprints (like a needle in a haystack). As a proof of concept, we used Kartograph to extract the relevant 256KB chunks from 1+GB processes and built what is considered the most difficult cheat to build: a map-hack. We will show a live demo of how Kartograph works and some cool cheats we built with it for CIV4, AoE3, Anno, and WarIII. If you want to learn about memory forensic techniques, or if you want to cheat at these popular games, you don't want to miss this talk.

Presenters:

  • Elie Bursztein - Stanford University
    Elie Bursztein is a researcher at the Stanford Computer Security Lab. He holds a PhD in computer science and an Engineering degree in computer systems, networks and security. His research focus is offensive technologies, mobile and web security. He enjoy applying game theory, machine learning and data mining techniques to security.
  • Jocelyn Lagarenne - Stanford University Student
    Jocelyn Lagarenne is a student at the Stanford Computer Security Lab. He holds an Engineering degree in computer systems, networks and security. His research focus on system and network security.
  • Dan Boneh - Cryptography,Stanford University
    Dan Boneh heads the applied crypto group at the Computer Science department at Stanford University. Dr. Boneh's research focuses on applications of cryptography to computer security. He is a recipient of the Packard Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Award, and the RSA Award.

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