Arkem ^{(30 Posts)}

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…