Datasets:
Devilishcode
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hacking

Dataset card Data Studio Files
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Lets return to the present day. Independent blogs and webservers hosted out
of commodity hardware flourished, giving rise to famed stores of culture
that would become obsolete a few short years later when a new flashier
competitor appeared. Forum messages, Freeware, PDFs - the internet was
constantly sharing information in a freely accessible manner.
But monetization now flourishes in spaces it used to have no grasp.
Lines of Code Added to Open Source Projects Over Time
*10^8
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|1991 1994 1997 2000 2003 2006 2009 2012 2015 2018 2021
[4]
One such kind of place hard hit in the last few years is the new age forum:
social media.
On April 18, 2023 Reddit announced it would charge for its API [5]. Reddit
had enjoyed a thriving scene of custom clients adding quality of life and
accessibility features. RIF and Apollo were both apps forced to shut down.
The latter discovered they would have to pay 2 million dollars per month to
Reddit in order to operate a custom client which was simply passing through
requests [6]. From June 12 through to June 14 over 7000 subreddits blocked
access to their content entirely for everyone, known as a blackout. Some
subreddits continued beyond that timeframe. But unfortunately Reddit started
forcibly removing moderators from subreddits that stayed closed [7]. As of
today business is as usual and the API pricing has not changed.
A month before Reddit another social media platform had begun charging for
their API: Twitter. Their free tier has no read ability at all and the
enterprise plan has a hidden cost of 42,000 dollars a month. Multiple
services that provided tools not available in the official client had to
close, especially ones that provided a free tier like SocialBlade.
This trend demonstrated to me the urgency we should have to take back access
to our services. Like we used to have. And so I threw my hat in the ring and
made my own custom client.
/========================\
| 2. Super Mario Maker 2 |
\========================/
My first custom client was for a game I saw as a perfect candidate for open
data. Take the best selling video game franchise of all time [9] and allow
for user created content, perhaps one of the largest such games! The roots
of custom content, and especially courses, in the Super Mario series come
from romhacks: injections of new machine code and assets into existing
console-based Mario games. With a culture as rich as the demoscene-adjacent
romhacking scene the idea had potential.
--< 0. Removed Features
Super Mario Maker, the prequel, had a number of features that its sequel
lacked. Importantly, these features were largely problems with the interface
and not with the data accessible in game. One such feature is the ability to
search courses using more complex queries, available in Super Mario Maker
via an external site [10]. Another is the inability to view the entirety of
downloaded courses via panning, accomplishable in Super Mario Maker by
editing the downloaded course.
Some new features also lack the kind of searchability available in the
prequel. For example, "Ninji" speedruns have no browser leaderboard. Various
user leaderboards also lack a website.
--< 1. Prior Research
The work started with Kinnay's NintendoClients [11], which implemented
DAuth, AAuth, BAAS and the start of a custom client for Nintendo Online
enabled games.
As discovered by SciresM [12] the console has a chain of checks before
granting access to most online services. Unlike its predecessor the 3DS the
switch is capable of identifying and subsequently blocking access at a
hardware, Nintendo account and game level. There is also no way to forge
any set of credentials and each pair is linked it the other.
DAuth, or Device Authentication, is the entrypoint by which tokens are
returned for each part of the console, denoted by a `client ID`. Firstly a
`/challenge` is requested, the result of which is decrypted using a function
accessible only within the "TrustZone" of the switch, a physically separate
chip which has access to factory-baked keys in the hardware [13]. That
resulting data is appended to form data posted to `/device_auth_token`
as `challenge=%s&client_id=%016x&key_generation=%d&system_version=%s`. A
CMAC is calculated within TrustZone and appended to the form data as
`&mac=%s` in Base64. The resulting token is then passed down the chain, if
you are not hardware banned.