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Hacking Slot Machines by Reverse-Engineering the Random Number Generators

Interesting story:

The venture is built on Alex’s talent for reverse engineering the algorithms — known as pseudorandom number generators, or PRNGs — that govern how slot machine games behave. Armed with this knowledge, he can predict when certain games are likeliest to spit out money­insight that he shares with a legion of field agents who do the organization’s grunt work.

These agents roam casinos from Poland to Macau to Peru in search of slots whose PRNGs have been deciphered by Alex. They use phones to record video of a vulnerable machine in action, then transmit the footage to an office in St. Petersburg. There, Alex and his assistants analyze the video to determine when the games’ odds will briefly tilt against the house. They then send timing data to a custom app on an agent’s phone; this data causes the phones to vibrate a split second before the agent should press the “Spin” button. By using these cues to beat slots in multiple casinos, a four-person team can earn more than $250,000 a week.

It’s an interesting article; I have no idea how much of it is true.

The sad part is that the slot-machine vulnerability is so easy to fix. Although the article says that “writing such algorithms requires tremendous mathematical skill,” it’s really only true that designing the algorithms requires that skill. Using any secure encryption algorithm or hash function as a PRNG is trivially easy. And there’s no reason why the system can’t be designed with a real RNG. There is some randomness in the system somewhere, and it can be added into the mix as well. The programmers can use a well-designed algorithm, like my own Fortuna, but even something less well-thought-out is likely to foil this attack.

Tags: gambling, hacking, random numbers, reverse engineering

Posted on August 7, 2017 at 6:00 AM • 43 Comments

Fred P • August 7, 2017 2:03 PM

Comments on the article:

“Writing such algorithms requires tremendous mathematical skill…” – writing the original may. The reality for people writing code for slot machines is that we use one of the small number of approved algorithms. If we don’t, we’re unlikely to get it past the regulators.

“Equipped with Alex’s information and software, both obtained online for free, anyone with a smartphone will be able to turn a vulnerable slot machine into a gaudily decorated ATM” – this is silly. The response to a broken game is to shut it down. Even when the casino/lottery doesn’t know why, they’ll shut it down within a few days or less just because the payouts seem unusually high. For most casinos, that would just mean more play on other machines (ones that aren’t broken). In a case like he’s describing, I suspect that nearly the entire industry would be aware within a few hours.

While I can’t comment on if Alex reverse engineered the PRNG, I’ll note that when I was working for a slot machine company, that was one of our biggest fears. Even though the resources needed to reverse engineer against it seemed implausible (at the time), we attempted to guard against this, urged on by our customers and regulators. I have no reason to think that most or all of our competitors didn’t have this in mind. The easiest way to guard against this is to increase the injection of entropy (ideally, it should be greater than or equal to the information leakage).

Fred P • August 7, 2017 2:24 PM

@SL – “I would use it fill fixed roll sequence” – that’s a different kind of game – it’s pretty much how scratch-off lotteries work. As PRNG implementations tend to be decoupled from the games (Why? because your game isn’t on every machine you sell, but your PRNG is), it wouldn’t make much sense for the larger slot machine companies. Also, as a game design note, a 1% chance of a big win would be far higher (and likely result in far lower play) than any game we implemented; I don’t recall any of our competitors using anything close to a 1% chance of a high win, either. My recollection is that one of our most popular games was a 10 of 10 keno. The top prize was something like a 1 in 8,911,711 event. We also had slot games with similar odds for the top prize.

@Humdee “If the odds were truly random there would be no way to vet the results because there would be no way to verify the payouts.” – at least in the jurisdictions where we worked, the ability to verify recent payouts was a requirement tested both by the regulator (or the company they hired) and the end client (in one case these were the same legal entity). In theory, you needed a physical key to access that feature, among several others (none of which could impact the payout amounts or the payout percentage). That said, other than in a dispute situation, the casino/lottery doesn’t care about the individual pays – they care about he collective ones, over a day, a week, a month, or even a year. If a 92% payout game is paying out at, say, 101% (with a large umber of plays) over a week, they’re going to ask why. If it keeps doing so, or no good explanation comes up, they’ll shut that game down.

Bear • August 7, 2017 2:58 PM

I have encountered stupid security many times, specifically in gambling systems, that made errors which would be unthinkable in other computer security regimes.

You can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation and discover that there are 240 bits of information in a shuffled deck of cards. Guess what size seed a random number generator used for shuffling cards is usually initialized with? Guess what size state it has? Did you guess less than 256 bits? Did you guess a lot less? I’ve encountered 32, more than once. Meaning that if you can see seven cards you know the sequence of the entire deck.

The more teams like Alex’s make these mistakes expensive, the more they’re getting fixed. But in the gambling industry, it seems that the ratio of expense incurred to fixes implemented is much higher than seen anywhere else. Casinos literally spend years losing millions of dollars before anybody updates a product, whether software or hardware, to fix even the simplest problems. I don’t know whether the issue is a smaller, more specialized market where the same level of expense to justify some effort has a smaller number of victims to get spread over, or a failure of expertise to cross over from other venues, or simply a cultural question of how security is valued. But there is really a serious problem with security in gambling systems.

And yes, a better RNG would be dead simple to implement from a computer security perspective. But, until the expense mounts high enough, across enough casinos, to justify the replacement of every last slot with a slot where the RNG is actually better, casinos will continue to make more money by having the vulnerable slots on the floor accepting money from the millions of people who aren’t Alex’s team, than they lose to Alex’s team. The fix is a matter of how efficiently they win, not a matter of whether they’re winning or losing.

John Smith • August 7, 2017 5:56 PM

I think everyone is missing the point. Slot machine payouts are not designed to be random.

They are designed to be addictive. Use your google-fu on “intermittent reinforcement”.

The idea is to pay out just enough, and just often enough, to keep the player at the machine – the longer the better for casino profits.

Those occasional payouts give the gambler a nice but too-brief spike in dopamine. Just the thing to foster an addiction. The susceptible gambler wants more … and more … and chases a dopamine-mediated high with more and more losses.

The payouts are deliberately non-random in order to milk the gambling herd. A truly random payout would result in less addictive behavior and lower profits.

But because the payouts are non-random, they are exploitable in theory. A slot machine gang could try to hack the algorithm responsible for the intermittent, addictive reinforcement, by trying to predict when the machine is due to reinforce the player.

This has little to do with the design of any underlying RNG in the slot machine h/w or s/w.

Fred P • August 7, 2017 7:41 PM

@john Smith-

“Slot machine payouts are not designed to be random.

They are designed to be addictive.”

• We were trying for both. That said, they’re two separate problems. The first is implementing a PRNG well. The second is game design.

@Fredric L. Rice-

Well, yes – from the casino’s perspective, they’re getting x% of every dollar on average, which (with enough plays) tends to come out nearly exactly. That said, from the perspective of an individual player playing a small number of games, it appears random.

That said, back when I worked on slot machines, we had a test bed of 32 slot machines, which we had set up to automatically hit the correct buttons. We’d put in hundreds or thousands of “dollars” into them and let them rip. With rare exceptions, they’d all be out of money in a few hours. New people would be excited to do this at first with the “money” they “won”… but within a few hours, when they had to re-fill some machines multiple times, that stopped.

@Bear ” I’ve encountered 32, more than once.” excellent point. I think this was very common, roughly 20 years ago in VLTs (I can’t recall if ours was 32 or 64 bit. I think it was less than enough for a full deck to be correctly randomized). That said, the standard was also to re-shuffle between hands, which limited the direct value of this information, assuming that enough entropy was added between shuffles.

Bear • August 10, 2017 11:55 AM

People are still playing slots, because God never came out with a hot patch fixing all the bug reports I filed on our brain firmware. But I’ve about given up. It’s hardly worth praying, if He never makes any updates to his code.

Sadly, it’s an expense attached to an addictive behavior – compulsion, poor judgment, innumeracy, improper dopamine response, whatever combination of the above. The problem with that, IMO, is that that places it, most probably and usually, on those least able to afford it.

This is … I dunno, I guess I’ll say annoying or distasteful when it’s exploitation of rubes for business interests.

But when it’s a major source of funding for a state or nation it has the effect of a regressive tax. I think that goes further, making it actual bad public policy.

Of course, this is just one guy’s opinion. You’re free to use it if you like, but you’re also free to make your own. The world’s big enough for lots of different opinions.

moops • August 12, 2017 4:28 PM

Since the user has to physically interact with a slot machine you have a pretty good source of random number generation. Accelerometers in the buttons, time between button presses.

In the old days you would have had even more good sources: timing the coin drop in the slot, weight distribution in the coin holder, velocity profile of the machine arm.

but really, TRNG hardware is not that expensive relative to a whole slot machine. $25 will get you plenty of true hardware random bits to combine with a PRNG.

Win/Loss is an algorithm to stick on top of a properly built RNG.

I’m guessing the social factors to maintain addictive gambling habits is where the designs are compromised. Writing a house-biased but unpredictable slot machine is not hard, you can give it as homework at the college-level as long as you have a TRNG in hand. The only thing you should be able to predict is that the house eventually comes out ahead. Once you have to alter this game to have the optimal “flow”, in the lingo of slot machine design, then I would guess you have broken the randomness too much. Any alteration beyond the classic Skinner Box and you are likely creating the correct context for game hacking.

Rick • October 8, 2017 8:23 PM

Here’s a question from a newbie:

If the PRNG is weak, like that of the older Aristocrat machines, is it reasonable to assume that the casino’s supervisory control system (supposedly isolated from the slot’s PRNG) knows the PRNG sequence, knows exactly when the PRNG was initialized (to the microsecond) and knows exactly when the PRNG is supposed to spit out that winning random number?

I know that a player doesn’t have the information, but a casino’s supervisory control system could easily add an analog voltage to gate the slot’s push button start (not necessarily isolated from supervisory control system), to match or avoid the exact time corresponding to a winning random number. After all, the duration of mechanically pushing the button probably corresponds to several hundred different random numbers.

Is this scenario possible?

This act involves analog processing and should not require software, which can be detected by examining slot machine memory locations.

Why would casinos do this, since in the long run, the hold percentage must match that programmed into that particular slot? By directing winning combinations to new players, they can be encouraged to continue gambling, thereby, developing new slot machine enthusiasts. Winnings could also be directed to players who have a history of playing back their winnings, as opposed to pocketing them. Losers, who chase their losses, could lose faster, and presumably bet more to catch up.

That’s why the casinos push their player’s cards. To know your exact betting habits. It makes more sense, if winning & losing probabilities can be adjusted accordingly.

Is it possible? I think it is.