Could someone tell me where to look?

Question

Ok here is my idea - I want to create a program that sniffs packets coming into my computer from an online Poker Server. I want to read the cards in my hand and in the flop with this program. Im starting to read and learn about sockets, but my question is, since im logged in to my poker program, wouldnt my java program need to be 'logged on' as well, to be able to 'see' my cards? i know it must be posible, but so far studying sockets i have seen nothing about logins/passwords. can someone point me in the right direction to some materials to study? Im confused about security i guess. Sorry for being such a n00b and wasting your time! :D

Answer 1

This is complicated. You shouldn't be worrying about logins/passwords yet. The first thing you need to do is to examine the packets the program and the server are exchanging. Several years ago I looked into programs that did this, but don't remember much about them. Start googling and you can find a program to just log the packets going in and out of a port. Then you are going to need to learn to read those packets, so you are going to need some way to correlate what is happening on the screen with what is going over the port. So you are going to have to somehow log what is happening on the screen. Maybe the easiest would be some kind of screen capture program. You press ctrl-alt-printscrn and the screen gets logged to a file.
Now you have to sit down & figure out what it means. I would bet you aren't the first person to think of this, so there is a very good chance the messages being passed back and forth are encrypted. If this is the case, you are going to need to figure out the encryption algorithm. Unless you are some kind of codebreaker, the only clue you have is the program they sent you. Open it up in a debugger (a good one) and start figuring out where the code for the encrytion algorithm is. It might not be a good idea to go online and do this too much (although it's probably necessary) because they are going to get suspicious when they see a lot of 'broken' messages coming from you. If it's not encrypted, the job of figuring out the format is much easier.
Now that you know what the packets look like, you could write a program to listen to each side of the conversation between the program they gave you and the server and convert the binary messages into some kind of readable format. You do this as a proof of concept so that your program understands the meaning of what is going back and forth. To do this, you are going to need to get 'in between' the program and the server. You can either do this by putting code on a single machine or 'routing' it though another machine. If you put code on a single machine, there are a couple ways to do it. The simplest in Java would be to route the messages through one port, process them with your java program and then pass them out through another port which is being used by the poker program. This may or may not be possible depending on the poker program. You can also 'hook' the port and process the message 'on the fly', but this is beyond the capabilities of Java. You would have to use something like C++ for this.
The other option is to use two machines. One is just a 'pass through' for the packets and the other just runs the regular poker program. The 'pass through' machine contains your java program.
Now your job is to get the java program to emulate the poker program. You could start out simply by figuring out when it was obvious to fold. So the only thing the 'pass through' program does is auto-fold. You start adding features to it including the username/password deal you started out on.
It's probably a good idea if you understand exactly what you are doing before you start any of this because I think that if the poker service gets even the slightest hint that you are doing something like this, they will shut you down like Napster.
If you are starting to get the idea that this might constitute a lot of work... good, because it will be.