Quote:Original post by sharpnova
There is little or no chance of the OP being able to hack anything or cheat to gain any unfair advantage in the game. However, emulating servers is illegal in the case of WoW. He should have asked more discreetly about the process of generating such a log file in general.

Isn't it illegal to emulate pretty much any of the big mmrpgs? I know there many Ultima Online emulators avaible and some of them are supposedly quite big as well. Isn't there Lineage emulators also?

What is it that makes it specifically illegal to write a WoW emulator than to emulate the other mmrpgs? Aren't they all illegal, or is some more/lesser illegal than the others? :P

The main reason for encryption is privacy. Any realistic company can realise that encryptions can be reversed easily by someone with access to their client, but for someone sniffing along the line, it's not such an easy task. There is the benefit of having a protocol protected from amateur hackers, but they know it'll be reversed eventually anyway. The privacy means someone on a network won't be able to peek at somebody's login for instance, infact, theres probably additional encryption/hashing for u/n and passwords.

It's not completely legal or illegal to emulate, but there are some real boundaries you shouldn't cross. The first legal issue is you're directly opposing the Terms of Agreement set by Blizzard. Particularly "4. Limitations on your use of the service". I'd advise you read it and read it again if neccesary. It sums up that you can't emulate their game, however, there are usually holes in ToA/S that can avoid court, I've not looked much into Blizzards though. There are other legal issues involved in reverse engineering encryption algorithms, attempting to 'hack' Blizzard servers (by means of sending custom structures, which is usually required to completely reverse a protocol), etc.

Copyrights are quite easy to get around if you avoid immitating their service precisely, and very importantly, use chinese wall techniques. I'd guess most server emulators have probably ripped the encryption method from the client or made a HLL version of it, but they're still similar in too many ways that it's a breach of copyright.

In most cases the developing companies do not have the resources to combat server emulators and crackers. The bigger games, although provide more resources, generally have more people cracking them. The bigger companies have realised that the way to prevent emulation is to deter people from playing the clones rather than trying hopelessly to stop it with code.

There have been relatively few legal cases in comparison to the quantity of emulators around for various games. A recent one was FBI raids on Lineage2 server emulators based in America. The scenario here was people were usng copyrighted work (leaked NCSoft code), and they were silly enough to host them in America. You'll find that most server emulators host throughout europe or elsewhere where the legality isn't so well defined.

On-topic. Encryption algorithms are simple to reverse. You need some moderate knowlegde of assembly, processor architecture and any API's involved, particularly the socket ones (I'm assuming Winsock is used). In brief, attach a debugger, set a breakpoint on recv()/WSARecv(), which will trigger when a packet is received. Look at lpBuffer or lpBuffers in memory and if neccesary set hardware breakpoints on encrypted parts, if you continue code execution, it'll break when the code tries to access or modify the packet buffers, which you can assume or check, if it's for decrypting. You now know the location of the encryption algorithm and it's usually very easy to make sense of. I'm not going to needlessly give more info than that.

Ah, and my opinion on the topic, it doesn't really belong here. I would re-clsoe it tbh. There are places other than here you can find out about this, and it's generally off topic to this forum.