Mario Kart Tour – Owned

Video Game hacking is a thriving business and attracts new technological challenges for game developers, who need to protect their assets from exploit creators and cheaters. This research is focused on the analysis of Nintendo’s flagship game — Mario Kart Tour, and its anti-tampering and anti-cheating mechanisms. It carefully examines the defensive techniques employed by the game, such as root and emulator detection and anti-reverse engineering.

Furthermore, it presents multiple cheating methods developed specifically for the purpose of this research, to emphasize the need for server-side validation over client-side validation. It explores and demonstrates a number of exploits, such as score manipulation and invincibility, which all bypass the anti-tampering mechanisms and void the integrity of the game. The paper also looks briefly at the multiplayer communication protocol. Finally, it suggests ways of improving the security of the application by means of crowd-sourced moderation and points to future work related to Nintendo’s anti-cheat patent.

This presentation is co-presented with Antonio Macovei, Systems Engineer at Cloudflare.