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Finding the root of a datastructure

 
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Vindictive
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 06, 2017 6:13 pm    Post subject: Finding the root of a datastructure Reply with quote

In my game I have a table like data structure. It's basically a list of different worlds. Each world has different properties, Example, it's name, number of players in the world, etc.

Using CE I can find dynamic addresses of these properties for the different worlds. But can not find a static address for the individual properties and my understanding is that only the root of the datastructure with have some sort of static pointer pointing to it while all the members (the worlds) of the data structure will be pointed to dynamically.

I hope this makes sense. Put in another way it's just like this forum. Forum is like the datastructure and all the different threads are members of forum and each thread has properties, replies, date created, etc. How do I go about finding the root of a datastructure like this so that I can grab all the information inside the datastructure?

I don't need a written solution I just need to know what to research because pointer scanners don't work but I'm assuming it will once I find the root of the data structure. Is this perhaps a problem for ollydbg?
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Prehistoricman
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 06, 2017 7:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If you use 'find out what accesses this value' on the world data, you should see the instruction has an offset similar to the one you have in your structure. It may look like:

mov eax, [ecx+F8]

Here, ecx is the base address for your struct
Now open the disassembler at this location to see the assembly that executed before this instruction. You should see that ecx (in my example) got its value from somewhere. If it looks like:

mov ecx, [esp+C]

then your job is a bit harder. You need to find the calling function because 'esp' is the stack pointer. The value for the base of the structure was passed in from somewhere else.
If it looks like:

mov ecx, [ebp+20]

Then you may be more lucky. Here, ebp is the base address for a structure that contains the pointer to the world structure. If you dissect data on this ebp structure, you may find many many pointers to all the worlds.

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Vindictive
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 06, 2017 8:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I can't post URL's yet but here's the image of what I found if you remove the spaces: https: / / ibb.co / mZMahb

It's a bit different from what you said I might find but I imagine very few things are the same when game hacking. Does this look right to you? I assumed it was 6th opcode because it was the most similar to what you said.

If you think this might be correct, in this case it uses 2 registers how do I go about finding the base?

EDIT:

Something must be wrong because EDI was the address of the property I was seeing what accessed it. EAX is 1 and ECX is an address in memory that is surrounded by ??
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Prehistoricman
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 07, 2017 4:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah this instruction might not be useful. You can see that ecx = 1 here, which means that ecx*4-04 = 0.

What part of the world structure did you look at here? How big is the world structure?

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Cake-san
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 07, 2017 8:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Based on the image,

If I'm you , I will trace of where [esi+ecx*4-04] get its value because it give the value to [edi+ecx*4-04] which its value is pointer address.

#ps: that ESI hold a stack address, for your information...

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Vindictive
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 15, 2017 9:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Prehistoricman wrote:
Yeah this instruction might not be useful. You can see that ecx = 1 here, which means that ecx*4-04 = 0.

What part of the world structure did you look at here? How big is the world structure?


How can you find out how big a structure is?
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Prehistoricman
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 2:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

It can be hard to know. What's the largest offset you've found so far to be useful in the structure?
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