Online Game Vulnerablilities

I've decided to take a 'turn' in my focus and I am looking for a place where I can find information on how to know when there is a hole and understand how to manipulate it and correct it. Both have valuable information and I wish to understand them but I dont know even what to search for. Search words or phrases would be greatly appreciated, I am learning C++ and have no skills there at this moment but I'm working on it and this is my focus. Does anyone know a good location that explains the development of patches and what is looked for in both exploiter and programmer to fix and use flaws in online based games. Thanks for any help.

I posted some info on C and C++ in one of my posts. You can try the following
programming links like:

www.cprogramming.com
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/C++/
http://www.vb-bookmark.com/CppTutorial.html [This is a good one.]
http://www.programmingtutorials.com/main.asp [this is also a good tut.]

and the list goes on...

Online games are mostly made in Java, Flash and other formats and programming languages. It is seldomly made in C++. Java is very secure because it is made keeping the 'Internet' in mind. However, there might be some vulnerabilities and flaws in some online games. You can search for 'Online Games Vulnerabilities' in Google. You will find many patches and solutions that would eliminate some flaws. I will try to find out more info on this.

I hope that answers some of your queries.

Quote:

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Originally posted here by hollow_man
Online games are mostly made in Java, Flash and other formats and programming languages. It is seldomly made in C++.

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I think he was talking about games like Half-Life, Unreal tournament, etc. etc. These games are all programmed in C++ rather than java.

Most exploits are based on buffer overruns/overflows. There have been some tuts on this subject here, my favorite being by zxtech
You can find it here:
http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=113482

This will help because the first thing to know in exploit detection, is to understand what causes them. (It might be a bit hard to understand depending on how well you understand c)

Also i found a sample of discovering a vulnerability, and subsequently exploiting it at @stake

A good file that i have kicking around which explains in pretty simple detail (easy to understand) how the stack works pertaining to buffer overflows. Its attached at the bottom.

Hope this helps

thanks everyone, I'd add greenies to ya but I'm way over on my pos and I'm being forced to give out negs (I think I'll stay where I am on AOpts) but anyways thanks a whole lot. hollow_man, I was speaking of games like Unreal, Q3, etc that are created with C and just played online. thanks for the links

You are welcome Tuskin. Well 'online games' is quite a huge subject. It includes many aspects, I thought up of a different one. :)
Online games such as Unreal Tour., Quake 3, Half-Life etc. are made in C++ but requires a lot of programming. There is usually a team of programmers who write different modules and classes in C++ and they integrate them at the end.

The info transferred between the client and server sides is quite less. The info is usually in text form so that the game play over the Internet is smooth and fast. The server also takes into account the fast or slow recipients as there are many players belonging different networks.

what would that mean for exploitation? They would have to be working with 'texts'? What kinds of measures do they have to prevent tampering with packets and other authentification protocals. If the game's main focus was to keep it 'legit' and free from exploits then what measures are taken and how do people find ways around them? (I know this is a very broad range of things but if you can keep me going in a direction I'll know more what I'm trying to identify and find.) Is the buffer overflow still the way to go in these instances? Games like never winter nights (i think that is the correct game name) or D2 those are games that are 'protective' of their sent and received packets... what is a term to define their networking security workings? (I'll do my own searching but I dont know what I'm looking for in that instance.)

Games are an intresting subject, and there has been only a few security flaws found in games. Mostly DOS's with creating or joining a game.
Games are harder to diagnose because it is some what harder to know what the packets are really doing.
Example

If i was to be doing some code auditing on an email server i would know how an email server acts, replys, and know of var's that would have set buffers that may be 'smashable'.
To really attack at a game you need to be able to understand how the internal workings of it work, for example

Someone shoots me, that shot carries a few var's, type of gun, distance etc.. Now if you were able to sniff at a network layer and figure out how this object was created and each var set, then im sure at some point in the game there would be a buffer that would not be checked where say, the distance of shooting with a rocket launcher when greater than 99999999 causes the game to crash and code could then be injected, bounced to in the stack.

If you were able to find somthing like this, then you could simply play the game as normal and then eaither modify your game to send the right packet, else inject a packet into the udp stream (most games these days use udp streams). This is why most attacks are done when a game is joined or created. It requires a fair bit of indepth searching to find flaws..

HOWEVER
If you could find a flaw that would effect every client attached to the server (as data for say, a bullet being fired is sent to each client) then you could attack/overflow/exploit 30-40 at a time.

I would be very intrested in working with anyone who wants to help me to start probing flaws in common online games as i belive there is alot of room for exploits in this field.. And alot of large companies (and goverement agencys) play games online =)

if u ask me hes just looking to find some sploits so he can cheat on online games.. I think if this isnt what he was looking for he woulda worded his question a bit differently then he did

not trying to flame but thats how i see it...

your best guess is to find recently discovered exploits and find out what they exactly did, as for games and cheats just look for open source prodjects based on cheating in games..


but as the old saying goes.. "nobody likes a cheater"

I am looking to 'cheat' but I want to make my own. I'm not looking for some pre-packaged one click there ya go type thing. I am actually looking to learn and hopefully use that in a security related sense too (not breaking). I do want to 'cheat' but its not to mess things up, I'm just wanting to tweak stuff :-)

thanx OxcOffee