Andy Malakov software blog

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Mindstorms are back

Online game like this will be excellent for software job interview.
Cover voor Light Bot

Friday, September 12, 2008

Obfuscated code

Situation: Third-party client API library periodically fails with nasty exception:


Caused by: cli.System.AccessViolationException: Attempted to read or write protected memory.
This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.
at cli.TalTrade.Toolkit.DataBlock.ReadData(Unknown Source)
at cli.TalTrade.Toolkit.RawData.GetDataAsBlock(Unknown Source)
... 34 more


After verifying that input parameters are legitimate I decided to take a look at the failing code. My trusty Reflector exposed the following:



private unsafe void ReadData(void modopt(IsConstModifier)* pData)
{
// This item is obfuscated and can not be translated.
...
if (*(((int*) (&gtal_handle + 4)))[4] < 6)
goto Label_0038;
ushort num5 = *((ushort*) (((*(((int*) (&gtal_handle + 4))) + *(((int*) (&gtal_handle + 4)))[6]) - 8) + 6));
... 100 more lines like these ...
}



That code is supposed to read data block from memory queue and possibly format it as string. What kind of secret know-how can it be?

Now instead of figuring out the problem by ourselves we are going to send this error to the vendor. What a waste of time on both sides.