Giants in Tech => Google | Alphabet | Gmail | Meta | YouTube | Telegram => Topic started by: javajolt on April 05, 2019, 01:55:32 PM
Title: Researchers Hack Google Maps Snake Game to Add God Mode, AI Auto-Play
Post by: javajolt on April 05, 2019, 01:55:32 PM
(http://i.postimg.cc/4xpxqYmQ/snake2.jpg)
Check Point's research team tried the April Fools snake game added by Google inside the Android and iOS Google Maps apps and, after failing to play it for as long as they wanted, they reverse engineered it, stuck an auto-play AI inside, and removed the "loss" factor altogether.
This happened because they were too busy researching cyber threats all day long to keep playing it for hours on end.
Seriously though, they just decided to hack it to make it look like they're working. That and the fact that they were becoming more and more irked by the little April Fools game thwarting their record achieving efforts, made them go ham and reverse engineer it using browser-based remote debugging.
After getting to the game's innards, the Check Point Research team managed to add a simple AI which would auto-play the game and, more importantly, changed the code so that they could play it without losing.
To start the reverse engineering process, the researchers loaded the game within a Genymotion Android emulator which allowed to notice that the game was rendered in a WebView that led them to the snake.googlemaps.com domain where the game web app was hosted.
On the web app site, they found the JavaScript which initiated the game's playing board and removed the conditions which would have killed their snake when hitting the board's walls, effectively implementing god mode within the game.
Once they could go through walls and never lose again, they decided to go one step further and make add an Artificial Intelligence to the game so it can play itself while they would sit around cheering it along the way.
While the process of adding an AI within the game would be trivial for most developers—I am a mere mortal, so it wasn't for me—describing it would be too much of a daunting task, therefore, you can find a full step by step description HERE (http://research.checkpoint.com/reverse-engineering-the-google-maps-snake-game/).
The Check Point researchers also published a video with the entire reverse engineering process on YouTube (might be more fun than the game for some people).