I reverse engineered a board game
A developer reverse-engineered the Android app for the board game 'Hitster' to bypass its requirement for a music streaming subscription. By decompiling the APK and locating decryption logic, the author successfully accessed the game's internal song mapping data.
Why it matters
This demonstrates the vulnerability of mobile applications that rely on 'security through obscurity' for local data protection.
I recently received a game called “Hitster” as a gift. It’s a board game where you try to identify songs and guess things like when they came out, who the artist or band is, etc. Each card has a QR code that you scan using the Hitster app, which then plays the music through Spotify or Apple Music.
Sadly, the app requires an Apple Music or Spotify subscription. In this blog post, I’ll go down the rabbit hole of reverse engineering the Android app and bypassing their very, very sloppy attempt at hiding the data.
First, we need to understand how the game works.
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