Making my EXE 'save' (from Cheats and hacks...)

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Hi Firlefanz,

There will be some kind of trade off in terms of performance. It depends on how often you access the properties and how. If you read them more than you write, then you may want to move the memory moving code to the write access method.

With regards to your question about moving individual items or the whole record... moving the whole record would achieve the same thing, but I would say that the chances of some kind of trainer locating the data are increased. The reason being, the values will always be in the same order in the block, so pattern matching may turn up the block. If you move each item, then they will move around each other in memory making pattern matching on unchanged values harder.

There are a lot of options to make it very difficult for trainers, but there will be some kind of performance hit. The level of that hit depends on how much protection you want.

[K4Z]

Packers, Upack, UPX, etc, will only slightly hinder people from hacking and patching your exe. Most have no effect on preventing Memory hacking.

I haven't tested it, but Athena's example looks really good, and should annoy amature crackers. But there are techneques and memery hacker programs that can automatically adjust to offsetting and moving addresses, especially if the move is predictable.

One technique you could try is shadowing the data, having duplicate variables (preferably encrypted, a simple xor with a random value should do). When one variable changes, change the duplicate as well. Either real-time or every now and then (or during a screen switch, Alt-Tab, etc), just check the variable values to the (encrypted) duplicates.
Something like that, coupled with Athena's sample, should be simple and quick enough to implement.

Ofcourse, it may be best to apply the protection to critical values, would be overkill to apply to all those variables :shock: .

and... , if data is written to the harddrive, it can be easily modified, so preventing memory hacking is useless unless the save files are aslo protected.

Geeewd Luck!

Game Hacking is inevitable

[Firlefanz]

Hi!

this suggestion is also good, having two energy variables and changing both each time, having them coded somehow and look from time to time if they are still the same, did I understand that right?

I only care about that 'cheating' stuff because I have an online HiScore-List.

Thanks,
Firle

[K4Z]

this suggestion is also good, having two energy variables and changing both each time, having them coded somehow and look from time to time if they are still the same, did I understand that right?

Yep, that's it. Just remember that the duplicate should not be directly equal to the original (If they are, then they would both be found and changed together). So they'd have to be encrypted.

[Sly]

Anti-Cracking FAQ from a Delphi perspective.

[Firlefanz]

Veryvery interesting read. Thanks Sly.
I will create a licence that is no license and built in a few warnings that will never be called, this will cause some confusion perhaps.

I know I cannot make it impossible, I cannot even make it hard, but perhaps a bit harder. Then a possible hacker might lose interest because it is no professional game after all.

Thanks!

Firle

[JSoftware]

indeed very interesting read. Bookmarked

[Traveler]

Agreed! I vote for addition in the Library.

Sly, any chance you have more of these little gems?

[Sly]

I first found that page several years ago.

What others do I have hidden around here.
Photoshop-style blend modes in Delphi. A description of the different types of layer blends you can do in Photoshop and sample Delphi snippets to reproduce each effect.

Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering. Very high quality fonts in comic book styles. Half of his fonts are free to download and use, but that's still a lot of fonts.

Not much more that I have here at the moment. I might check on my work machine tomorrow to see what bookmarks I have there.

[Robert Kosek]

Heh, I remember that article. Read that a long time ago, now.

Question for ya'll though, mainly those who understand DLLs better. Say I have a hashing function I want to use in my app, as well as the protection algorithms and would like to place it in a seperate DLL. Can the DLL with the protection codes use the function within the hash DLL?

Just a food for thought item.