Welcome to Meme Over

Now that Omega Strikers has been in maintenance mode for a little while I thought it'd be a good time to write down my contributions before my memory starts to get hazy. I did some freelance work on Omega Strikers in the few months leading up to the beta, so the game was well established but needed a few technical bits and pieces done before launch. In particular I did some security audit work and…

After roughly a year of working unsuccessfully to secure funding I'm putting New Avalon on the backburner for a while. We talked to more than 50 publishers, venture capitalists, other investors, consultants and other experts looking for a way to support development but in the current climate there's not a lot of appetite for risk, especially from a new team without an advanced prototype. I'm planning on pushing the project forward in my spare time…

No news about New Avalon yet (we're still working on our prototype right now) but I was invited to speak on two podcasts recently to talk about anti-cheat. Links below! Malicious Life - The Problem With Kernel-Mode Anti-Cheat Software [ML B-Side] Cheat! - Gaming the Gamers

Another update! For the last 10 months or so I've been doing consulting work for game studio startups, helping them with their tech. In particular I've helped with game networking, server performance & infrastructure, and security. At least one of the games is coming out soon and I'll make sure I post about it here. While that's going on I've been exploring starting a game studio, after a few attempts trying with a Venture Capital…

My time at Epic Games has come to an end. It was brief but I learned a lot, I got to dust off some long unused skills (management) and got to work with some great people. Unfortunately the pandemic prevented me from spending time at Epic Games HQ or meeting many Epic employees in person but I'm sure the practice I got with remote work (and management) will come in handy! I joined Epic Games…

I'm changing jobs (after almost 7 years at Riot, that's a long run!) and I wanted to post a bunch of links to public facing stuff from my time at Riot, mostly VALORANT stuff from the past year, this is very self indulgent but think of it as a portfolio of sorts. Writing Riot Tech Blog - Fog of War Game Update 01: ON RAZE AND ANTI-CHEAT Game Update 02: ON VANGUARD ERRORS/SOLUTIONS, GUN SKINS,…

The VALORANT closed beta is open in NA and EU and the response has been overwhelmingly positive! However, the interest from cheaters has also been very high and we had to ban our first cheaters during the first week of the closed beta. There's also been a lot of interest around the details of the Riot Vanguard anti-cheat system, especially the kernel component. I ended up talking on reddit about it a fair bit and even got…

In addition to everything mentioned in the last post, I've been busy making a character based tactical shooter code-named "Project A". I'm the lead for anti-cheat and security but I've also put a lot of effort into many other parts of the game. Chances are the next few blog posts here will be about my work on Project A as the game gets closer to launch, there's not much I can share right now but…

I've been relatively quiet on this blog since I started working at Riot Games in 2013 in part because my day job has been more on the game development side than the security side so there haven't been a lot of security topics worth writing about. I thought since it has been five years now I'd do a round up now that I have a few years of bits and pieces that have some security…

Editors note: This used to be multiple blogposts that have been collected together in chronological order It turns out that many antivirus engines white list authenticode signed binaries regardless of the trustworthiness of the signature. Here's an experiment that I performed, feel free to play along at home (remember to be careful when working with malware). Step 1: Find some malware This was actually the most time consuming step, a lot of places talk about…

A quick update: The source code to TextHole is now available from my github account. TextHole is a basic text repository with the following features: Anonymous uploads and read access Optional Google OAuth2 authentication to allow you to delete or edit your uploads A simple JSON interface makes it easy to post and download text from other sites To download text via JSON make a GET request to http://texthole.arkem.org/download/[mesage_id] The reply will be a JSON dictionary with the…

I've been playing John Robertson's YouTube choose your own adventure game The Dark Room and I've been having a great time. However, I need a little help navigating the room (you see, it's dark in there) and so I wrote a program to do a little cartography and create a map of the game. The map shows the videos that comprise The Dark Room (abbreviated here for space and to limit the spoilers) with the size…