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KartographKartograph
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  2. video game

Kartograph

Available Media

video

Slides (pdf)

ConferenceDefcon 18 (Defcon) - 2010
AuthorsElie Bursztein , Jocelyn Lagarenne , Dan Boneh

Note this work was extended into a more substential research paper called Open Conflict

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, Command and Conquer 4, 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 do not want to miss this talk.

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