Reverse Engineering Pokémon GO

 rev  pokemon  writeup
Reverse Engineering Pokémon GO

Since last summer, my main hobby project has been developing my reverse engineering skills by tearing apart Pokémon GO and seeing what I could learn. I’ve played this game since it was released in 2016 (when I was 11), and it’s been a fairly major part of my life since then.

Last July I started by setting up a fairly basic PoGo map, as I described in an earlier blog post. This didn’t require any real technical skill on my part, because it was mostly setting up and running software that other people had already built. I wasn’t satisfied with this, and after I got my map running, I began exploring the game myself, and I found lots of interesting stuff.

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An Explanation of the Pokemon GO Guaranteed Lucky Trade Mechanic

 pokemon  info
An Explanation of the Pokemon GO Guaranteed Lucky Trade Mechanic

Since the introduction of lucky trades in Pokemon GO, there has been an obscure mechanic known as “Guaranteed Lucky Trades” that not many people understand. This is different from “Lucky Friends”, and the game gives no indication ahead of time as to whether or not a trade will be a Guaranteed Lucky Trade (GLT).

In a recent blog post, Niantic announced that they were increasing the GLT cap from 15 to 25, which caused the feature to gain some more attention, and at the same time more confusion.

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WiCyS CTF 2023

 ctf  writeup  rev  web
WiCyS CTF 2023

This weekend I participated in the 2023 RIT Women in Cybersecurity CTF challenge. Overall it was pretty fun, and I ended up coming in first place, winning the grand prize of a new wireless mechanical keyboard 😎. There were a lot of challenges, some good and some less good, but I picked five of my favorites to share.

Intergalactic Disco Octopus Rave

This was the first challenge I looked at. It ended up being really easy, but I found it enjoyable and silly regardless.

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Chandler Pokémon GO Mapping

 project  pokemon
Chandler Pokémon GO Mapping

Introduction

Over the past few months, I’ve been working on developing a system to scan and map Pokémon GO spawns (among other things) for my local community. I don’t play enough to really take advantage of it myself, but hopefully others find it useful. My true goals here were twofold:

  1. Gain experience developing computer programs, reverse engineering, and networking
  2. If it works, potentially gain a small source of passive income to support myself while attending university

Background Research

When Pokémon GO was first released in 2016, it had an exposed API that allowed pretty much anyone with the required knowledge to build all sorts of maps and tools to assist players. This was fixed after not very long, and for quite some time it became something of a cat-and-mouse game between Niantic, the developers of the game, and the developers in the community trying to exploit it.

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5090X Worlds Robot 2023

 vex  writeup  showcase
5090X Worlds Robot 2023

Prototyping

For our Worlds robot, we wanted to move back to a flywheel design after running into some issues with our slingshot. We started by looking at what some other teams had done and decided to base our designs on that.

We started by building on the old copy of our chassis we still had laying around, so we could know if this was going to work before we completely dismantled our robot from States.

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Full Screen Doom for the V5

 vex  showcase
Full Screen Doom for the V5

Doom on the V5 has existed for around 5 years at this point, I believe the original project was by sealj553.

This original port of doom to the V5 required both an SD card, and was also limited by the existence of the program bar which takes up 32 pixels at the top of the brain’s screen.

My version is the original modified to run into neither of these challenges. For what should be obvious reasons, I’m not releasing the source code, but I will provide the pre-compiled binary that anyone can download to their V5.

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