Content

musings on poker bots and more

Insecurity through security: decrypting SSL by adding 4 lines of code

Tuesday 20 March 2012 - Filed under Poker Bots

Protecting a poker site from bots has many different sides. It requires active detection, both on the server and on the client side. However, it also requires passive protection: you need to make it difficult for bot writers to circumvent your security measures. In this article we will study a way around the security measures used by the CEREUS poker software.

Since Black Friday, the CEREUS poker network has pretty much gone away. So, I’m going to share this story here. As some of you might remember, CEREUS poker had a lot of scandals back in the day. One of these was an encryption scandal. Technicians from PokerTableRatings determined that the CEREUS poker software was not properly encrypting the data stream between poker server and client. CEREUS fixed this shortly after the discovery by implementing some SSL protocol. From then on, all communications between the client software and the server were encrypted, and very difficult for anyone (including bot writers) to intercept. Right?

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Progress

Tuesday 20 March 2012 - Filed under General

I have not written any new posts in quite some time. I thought I’d take the time to explain why, and at the same time promise new content.

Some time ago, I started a consulting company1 together with Noah Stephens-Davidowitz. We specialize mostly in poker security: we do things like bot detection, collusion detection, etc. It’s extremely interesting and challenging work. It does however make writing this blog more difficult.

For example, suppose I were to write a tutorial on how to write a simple poker AI. One that played off-line, that could not beat humans, but one that did play some pretty strong poker. I’d find this extremely interesting, and I don’t think it would be particularly harmful for poker. However, it could be argued that I’d be creating the problem (botters) for which I’m selling the solution. So, I can’t do that right now. For every post I write, I have to carefully weigh in what way it could influence perceptions. That’s why I’ve gone so long without writing new posts.

However, this will change. I’m going to post more often on this blog again. In fact, the next article in the series on poker bots will be posted within 24 hours.

We’re going to hack Absolute Poker’s client side security. Kind of.

  1. Send me an email for more information. [↩]

Poker Bots – Part 3: Detection pt.1

Friday 4 November 2011 - Filed under Poker Bots

This post is the third part of my series on poker bots and their threat to online poker. If you’d like to be notified whenever I make a new post, please subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter. (See the sidebar on the left.) In this post, we’ll look at detection methods poker sites use to detect bots, and the ways botters circumvent these. Some descriptions will be rather technical: feel free to skip over those parts.

The cat and mouse

Poker sites don’t accept bots. All sites have rules in their terms & conditions prohibiting the use of bots. Most sites actively attempt to enforce this, to some degree. In this part of the series, we’ll look at some ways the sites do this right now. I will not be speculating about ways sites can improve these measures, nor will this list be exhaustive. This is for several reasons:

  1. Public disclosure warns botters, so both existing unknown and new methods should not be published.
  2. I am currently in talks with one or more poker sites to work with them (together with Noah Stephens-Davidowitz) to help mitigate the bot problem. (As we publicly offered here.)

So, this article will talk about the current measures being taken by poker sites, and how they are generally bypassed by botters. If I mention something here, it is probably common knowledge among good botters — I won’t be teaching them anything new.

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Poker Bots – Part 2: Communities

Friday 28 October 2011 - Filed under Poker Bots

This post is part of a (somewhat illustrated) series on poker bots and their threat to online poker. If you’d like to be notified whenever I make a new post, please subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter. (See the sidebar on the right.) In this post, we will be looking at the different public poker botting communities that have existed over the years. 

The history and social order of our electronic overlords

Humans are social animals. Even the evil masterminds of the world have people they see as friends. (Wannabe) poker bot operators (from now on called botters) are no different. They too have gathered in places to discuss poker strategy, AI techniques, bot stealth technologies, the latest developments in the security of poker sites, and football. These forums allowed them to form groups, starting “companies” to engage in the act of botting together. In some ways, these evil people seem surprisingly human.

Many of these forums are public. We’ll take a look and see what we can find out about the average botter who visits them. Since many parts of this world exist in the shadows, this overview will never be a complete map of the botting world; we can only get a glimpse. But, in my opinion, that glimpse is interesting enough.

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Poker Bots – Part 1: Introduction

Tuesday 25 October 2011 - Filed under Poker Bots

Kicking off this blog, I will be writing a series on poker bots and their threat to online poker. This is a vast topic, so I will be splitting it into a few parts. If you’d like to be notified whenever I make a new post, please subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter. (Both links are somewhere on the right of this page.) Topics I want to cover include an introduction to poker bots, a history and the current status of poker botting in online poker, an overview of different AI techniques and more. I may even teach you how to write a simple poker AI. Today will be the introductory post.

So why are you writing this series?

Poker bots are a hot topic right now, as evidenced by the many forum threads on the topic. What’s also evident is that many posters in those threads are completely unaware what bots precisely are, how they work, and how far ahead their development is. You see posts of the form “I’m not worried because…”

  • “… bots can only be as good as their developer.”
  • “… bots can’t beat humans.”
  • “… bots can’t adjust.”
  • “… I am better than the bots in my games.”

and many similar statements. These are all misguided, and this series will hopefully clear up these misconceptions. Bots are indeed a huge problem. They are taking millions of dollars out of the poker economy1, and unless something happens, it’s only going to get much, much worse.

Nevertheless, poker AI is an awesome field. Studying it is a great way to learn more about AI, game theory and mathematics & computer science in general. If I can get anyone interested in one of those fields, then that by itself will have made this series worth it.

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  1. I should really have a citation here. Instead, I’ll refer you to one of the future posts when we’ll be studying the current state of poker bots. [↩]

Introduction

Tuesday 25 October 2011 - Filed under General

I have decided to start a blog. I’ve toyed with the idea before, which resulted in starting Subject: Poker together with Noah Stephens-Davidowitz.

Anyway, this blog will be about topics that interest me personally. I mostly expect my writings to be about things relating to poker, mathematics and/or computer science in some way. For example, I’m starting with a series of posts about poker bots. (The first part can be found here.)

If you’d like to be notified when I make a new post, please follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my RSS feed. If you have a question or a comment, I can always be reached by email