Hack detection

[shout]

While driving home, I came up with an idea for hack detection for my bot, and I would like comments.

Some background: My bot is a 'tournament bot', and will interconnected to other bots. The bots will set up  tournament trees and such, and I wanted a way to make sure no one is hacking in these tournaments.

So, I was thinking I could have the bot load the data from some known hacks, (as far as I know most hacks are dll injection) and read the game process, looking for the hack data. I am not quite sure how to implement this at the moment, but I'm sure it can't be to hard. Then if it detects a hack it will message the other bots that the client is hacking.

[Soul Taker]

And the hacker intercepts the message saying he is hacking.

[shout]

Kill the game process then?

[Kp]

Write a clone of your bot that always announces "Not cheating" without actually checking whether the user running it is cheating.  Then he can run any hacks he wants and not get caught.  Alternately, instead of cloning your bot, hack your bot so that any time it attempts to read game locations which the hack has modified, it instead receives the "correct" data.  This would be fairly straightforward to do, probably not more than a few days work.  With some cleverness, it could even be made version independent.

[R.a.B.B.i.T]

If you could inject the anti-hack into the game, however, it would work better (sort of like how Valve's VAC works, but that's built in).

[Kp]

If you could inject the anti-hack into the game, however, it would work better (sort of like how Valve's VAC works, but that's built in).

Why would it work better?  Any code running on the client machine can be overridden with code that behaves in the interest of the client's user, not in the interests of the software owner.

[iago]

You could make it very difficult to override, with encryption and such, but in the end anything running on your machine is overridable.

[shout]

The point of my orginal plan is not modifying the game process at all. You also have to remember that most people are not that smart good at reversing/hacking, they just use the ones that other people make.

[Kp]

You also have to remember that most people are not that smart good at reversing/hacking, they just use the ones that other people make.

Sure, but what happens when someone makes and releases something of the quality I described above?

[shout]

You also have to remember that most people are not that smart good at reversing/hacking, they just use the ones that other people make.

Sure, but what happens when someone makes and releases something of the quality I described above?

At that time I deal with it.

[hismajesty]

Deal with it how?

[Joe[x86]]

If anybody thinks highly of you enough to reverse engineer and re-write your software just to use a maphack (what more of a hack is there, anyhow?) let them just do it.

[Warrior]

or not. If they exploit software, fix it.

[shout]

If someone wanted to take the time to reverse engineer a bnet bot, and exploit it, I'd say they need to get some help.

I could also go the blizzard way and do a checksum on the files, and am some sort of authorization check.

[Soul Taker]

I don't see why the thought of people making hacks (including hacks to get around anti-hacks) is such an outlandish and hard to grasp concept.