Signature aka Unknown6

[jaspervdm]

Since the unknown6 field has been reverse engineered, did you start looking into implementing it in this API? My main concern is the encrypt.so/.dll that is used. I think we can't use it directly since it's not a PHP shared library. We would have to write a wrapper or port the function to PHP code. The latter would have copyright issues. Any thoughts?

[Ni42]

Using a DLL file in PHP directly is a new one, that's for sure. Additionally, the python scripts are using xxHash, which is another dependency that we might have to deal with.

On a slightly related note, we should consider "re-merging" all the pogoprotos-php repositories to a common place, so there's not duplicate work done with so few people.

[DrDelay]

Regarding @Ni42's note here, merging them would be good, but that would (again) raise a discussion (kebabtent/pogoprotos-php#8) whether bramp/protoc-gen-php or protobuf-php should be used. I think the main reason why everyone's creating his own fork is that they're fixing bugs with bramp's one 😆 . The only problem that came up with protobuf-php so far was fixed within a day by the original dev after mentioning it (protobuf-php/protobuf-plugin#3). Of course by now, where most projects are quite advanced, switching to a new Protobuf-lib is some work to adjust (to be honest, though, the changes are not that big, mostly just other class names and passing streams in constructor instead of a read-method).

[Ni42]

I don't have enough insight in the work required, but just from what I'm reading, would you rather keep fixing things in an inactive/abandoned library or do the work of switching to a maintained one? It's an easy decision I guess, especially if you have to maintain these files anyways to to game API updates (or the current unknown6 situation).

[DrDelay]

(We are getting a little off topic here)

This is what I had to change to get the RetrievePlayerProfile-Example working: master...DrDelay:patch5-protobuf-php

Disclaimer 😆 :
This is not properly tested. Probably adjustments to the AuthTicket saving need to be made (resetting streams).
Every other example will probably fail as I didn't even run it once and only fixed until RetrievePlayerProfile worked.
This is only a proof-of-concept.

But as you can see, it is not overwhelmingly much.

[jaspervdm]

For sure protobuf-php seems the way to go, especially since that repo is still maintained. Ideally everyone that wants to use the protos for their API or whatever uses the same repo for the PHP classes to avoid doing double work. On Wednesday I am back at home. At that point I will test the test-protobuf branch some more (especially using same auth ticket multiple times as DrDelay already referenced) and merge it into master.

Regarding the actual topic of this thread: under Windows PHP extensions are DLLs. I was thinking if we could somehow use the encrypt.so/.dll as an extension. But like I said, we cannot use it directly since it's not written for PHP. I don't have experience writing extensions, but I am starting to look into it. I'm not sure if it's possible but the best option imo would be to write something that uses the encrypt.so/.dll as an external, so the extension itself wouldn't contain copyrighted material and we can put it on github.

[DrDelay]

I updated my branch with 6734412, because I now encountered the "AuthTicket stream thing" (Exact error is PHP Fatal error: Uncaught RuntimeException: Failed to write stream with 64 bytes in .\vendor\protobuf-php\protobuf\src\Stream.php:238) mentioned. This fix works, however I'm not sure whether this should be handled in the pogoprotos dependency. Ref

[NicklasWallgren]

I'm all for switching to protobuf-php, eventually.
We should get a separate branch going.

[Ni42]

So I tried around a little bit, and it is not too hard writing a PHP extension. I successfully compiled a PHP extension on my windows install that can find an external DLL and call a function from it... I can share my pathetic VC2015 file if you guys want it.

That basically means welcome to platform-specific PHP programming, because using a DLL using the Win32 API obviously doesn't work un Unix ^^

Anybody else got some progress?

[DrDelay]

I tried my luck with The COM class, no success however: Uncaught com_exception: Failed to create COM object 'encrypt.dll': Ungültige Dateierweiterung (Means "Invalid file extension")

[DrDelay]

Another thought I had:
I saw a repo with the source (encrypt.c and encrypt.h) of this .dll/.so, I think it was this, but it says 404 now.

The thought was: Why do we need a .dll/.so? Wouldn't this do (sorry for mistakes, my C is a bit rusty):

/* pogoencrypt.c */
#include <stdio.h>
#include "unknown6/encrypt.h"

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    printf("%s", encrypt(argv[1]));
    return 0;
}

The repo would be included as a submodule unknown6. We could then just call pogoencrypt(.exe) with shell_exec.
Are the copyright issues with this (if we ever find that repo again).

[Ni42]

You can only use the COM library for DLLs that are specially compiled, I may or may not have the C file, so we could try some things out.

The main problem was mentioned by @jaspervdm above, we can't really directly redistribute the encrypt DLL (or a recompiled version) without also going into copyright territory... That only really leaves us with the option of creating a way to "externally load" the DLL/SO, which has to be in the form of a PHP extension or external executable file.

[SchwarzwaldFalke]

Looks like there's a pure JS implementation of encrypt.c:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongodev/comments/4wo75h/pure_javascript_typescript_port_of_encryptc/

So I guess that would also be possible in PHP?
We could include the "encrypt.php" from some external source then.

[Ni42]

Might work too, would be easier than dealing with extensions/library files, two things come to mind: copyright (I have really no idea how this really works), and performance.

[MajorChump]

I've handled the xxhash dependency

https://github.com/MatthewKingDev/php-xxhash

tested vs the python implementation and the values are returning correctly so that's one less headache.

[Nexx4]

@MatthewKingDev Whats the difference between the original onces?

https://github.com/Megasaxon/php-xxhash
https://github.com/dred86/php-xxhash

They both supports PHP 7