MMORPGs provide countless hours of entertainment by allowing gamers to escape into exciting virtual worlds and form communities through their online interactions. However, these games are almost entirely at the mercy of their publishers: if the game is decommissioned and the server is shut down, these virtual worlds cease to exist, game communities are broken up, and the game is left virtually unplayable. At this point, many turn to reverse engineering the game to restore gameplay – a long, arduous technical challenge that is riddled with pitfalls and gotchas. This talk covers the journey I’ve gone through while reverse engineering a decommissioned MMORPG over the past 2 years. Technical aspects will be discussed, as well as legal implications and a project demo.
Dave Kukfa is a graduating senior in RIT’s Computing Security program, who is interested in application security and reverse engineering. In his free time, he enjoys participating in bug bounties and staring at disassembler output for hours on end.