Reverse Engineering of the MMORPG Client Protocol
Igor Tomičić, Petra Grd, Markus Schatten · 2019
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 non-encrypted 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.