Android Game Keeps Getting Hacked [closed]

Answer 1

It will be incredibly hard to inhibit this kind ov behavior. Anything that is handled on the client-side is hackable using APK decompilation and modding, memory editing with software such as Game Guardian ect.

The only way I can see how partially getting around it, would be to make an online game instead. Or have certain functions handled online. Or if anti-tamper encryption like denuvo ever is available for Android / iOS.

Answer 2

Piracy will always be an issue. By in large crackers are better at playing this Security Though Obscurity game than developers.

Answer 3

Chance, that there are more talented programmers then YOU (applies for all programmer), is 100%. And if that is true, you can not fix hacking. But you can spend as much time and effort on it to go bankrupt.

If you want to make some serious money you need to do some research on your target user group, and behavioral science. You need to make users playing that bring in new money, and thats it.

Besides, you got it all wrong. Hackers are most active members of your user base, thy just behave in a way you did not intend them to.

Take Zynga games on Facebook for example, do you think thy get hacked? - Sure, and about +100000 players only play, because thy can use bots, that automate everything.

Having huge active user base botnet of actual people, makes archiver type gamers want to play the game - and if thy play, and it looks cool, then Avarage Joe will also want to play. If Avarage Joe plays, then his friends might want to play, and thy probably will not care anything other, then being better then his/her friend, killing time or having something to chat about. Avarage Joe friends will most likely be willing to pay to be better then Joe, but rather thy would like to invest in something that makes them able to be better.

Besides if the real value is playing the game for free, then users who use the free hacked version, will most likely never would have payed for it. But thy are Avarage Joes and their friends just might. So this is like the cheapest commercial you can have. If you want to make money of your large userbase, then just make new versions of the game with small changes to levels and graphics.

Answer 4

I have been doing some apk decompiling and hacking for a while (not warez, but mods and hacks mostly to the google apps and the android framework, always abiding xda-developers policies).

Once you learn to read smali, it is almost as reading the original java code (but with way more LOCs). So, any code you add to check for keys can be found and deleted or replaced. You don't even need to recompile each time to eliminate more than one (some searches do miracles to find similar pieces of code) and, even if compilation/recompilation cycles are needed to find them, it's just a matter of one or two minutes to decompile: everything is automated by apktool and even more by apkmanager.

Having said that, my suggestion to you is to implement some sort of online scoring table or similar, and when the user looks at the score table online, you can check the hash code you implemented and compare it with the associated gmail account. That way you can report the hack to google and send a nasty message to the user of the warez, explaining why that is illegal.

Of course, a new hack could be implemented to eliminate the scoring table, but that would reduce the interest for the warez.

Good luck.

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Update

After researching to answer this question: Injecting code into APK (really about the Amazon DRM mechanism), I can tell a little bit on how Amazon is protecting the apps: it includes methods for checking for the installation validity everywhere (you can see an example of how they do it in my answer to that question). This will make any attempt to hack an app not very difficult, but extremely tedious. I believe that is a strong point: hackers won't want to spend so much time doing so many repetitive tasks: it's not challenging and it's boring. The main flaw I see in that approach is the possibility to hack the Amazon app itself to always return a valid answer, of course. But, if you mix your current hash checks with some sort of online check scattered among your methods, I believe the chances of it getting hacked may be drastically reduced.

Answer 5

My idea isnt hacker proof, but might remove some of the interest for hacking the game.

Freemium model

1) Make the first 5-10 levels free so people can learn the game and have some fun without paying. Less will want to hack the first level and the game will spread even further by Freemium model.

Shareware/clustered levelpacks

2) Let part of the game levels or logic stay online. Eg. when reaching for level 5 or 10 or 15, then download small parts for the game, and every time submit the progress-log from the game and validate this against possible values + hashcodes. This could perhaps make it possible to automatically close down of hacked accounts.

Stealth cheater protection

3) You could also just count "small warning flags" that you place around in the game. Dont just check for the "validation" in the beginning, no build these flags into the game logic itself. Dont make it break the gameplay, because then noone will look for it. Then when the user reached the end of level monster, check if there were any logged warning flags. These will not show up inside the game, so the unknowing user with a hacked edition could be playing for hours/days and suddently realize that he/she couldnt finish the game or advance to next level, because the game had a "bug". What the user didnt know was that this bug only occures on hacked clients.

Conclusion

Be smarter than the crackers. Fool them into thinking the job was done. Make a copyprotection and know that the more advanced crackers will be able to remove it. But they probably dont want to play 50 levels to check if the crack also works all the way.

Once they realize this problem, they might start to crack it too. But if you break the game up into level-packs, you can still validate between each pack download. So once you receive hacked client hash data, then just execute an exeception and crash the game on the client. Whoops the game crashed. Dont tell its because its hacked. A program error can happend. :-)

Again, its not hacker proof. But it might annoy them enough to move on to the next game. Lastly, you could also put out regular updates for the game and only the latest version should be able to "post the records" etc. so the active users would have to update to keep in the loop.

Answer 6

First, I do NOT consider myself a pro in the SW security field whatsoever, but:

I think an important thing is to let the application be dependent in some part(s) on the signature check. Don't let it affect immediately, but let it set some flags or change some values. later on, use those flags, check them, let the absence/incorrectness of them cause an exception of some kind which will terminate the application maybe. As long as the signature check is only relevant at the moment, it is easy to bypass it, to remove the line, once it touches more areas in the code, your application becomes harder (or less easier...) to hack. Also as I see it, not all checks should call the same routine for the sanction, because this will also make it easy to find the protection mechanism and terminate it.

Of course, the sanction to take in cases of illegal SW may vary, you might want to crash the application when used illegally, but you might as well want to keep it running, and only send message that asks the user to buy a legal copy of the application.

If this is just what you didn't want to hear, then I'm sorry for your time :)