dma-attack-techniques

dma-attack-techniques is a skill for Claude Code from gmh5225/awesome-game-security. It costs 70 tokens per session (16,671 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A security research guide about DMA, a method that lets hardware access computer memory directly. It covers PCIe devices, FPGA-based cards, memory access, and protections such as IOMMU or Intel VT-d.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to study PCIe DMA attacks, page-table walking, device impersonation, firmware mimicry, virtual environments, and ways to detect or reduce these threats in game security.
Why use it?
It explains how a hostile device can bypass some operating-system protections and what software-based game anti-cheat can and cannot detect. This helps define the limits of the threat model.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/. Also seen: mentions AGENTS.md.

Good fit Use it to study PCIe DMA attacks, page-table walking, device impersonation, firmware mimicry, virtual environments, and ways to detect or reduce these threats in game security.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/gmh5225/awesome-game-security/dma-attack
About the project

awesome-game-security is a curated collection focused on security research for games and game software, including cheating, anti-cheat systems, debugging, and anti-debugging. It is intended for security researchers and developers studying or building game-protection tools. The catalogue entries provide skills for AI coding agents related to the repository’s security workflows.

gmh5225/awesome-game-security · 3,491 stars · on GitHub · gs.awesome.rip

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add gmh5225/awesome-game-security --skill dma-attack
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gmh5225/awesome-game-security

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for dma-attack-techniques

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gmh5225/awesome-game-security/dma-attack/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/gmh5225/awesome-game-security/dma-attack)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gmh5225/awesome-game-security/dma-attack"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gmh5225/awesome-game-security/dma-attack/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for dma-attack-techniques

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gmh5225/awesome-game-security/dma-attack"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gmh5225/awesome-game-security/dma-attack.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 70 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 16,671 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Rogue Agent · line 1162
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00070 $0.16671
Opus 5 $0.00035 $0.08335
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.03334
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.01667

Measured 9d ago against content hash 4c6f8ee00a51, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dma-attack-techniques scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.claude/skills/dma-attack/SKILL.md · 1,782 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 1,782 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

DMA Attack Techniques

Overview

This skill covers Direct Memory Access research from the awesome-game-security collection, focusing on FPGA-based PCIe attacks, pcileech usage, physical-memory access workflows, and the defensive limits of software anti-cheat once a hostile device can read memory below the OS.

README Coverage

  • Cheat > DMA
  • Anti Cheat > Detection:DMA
  • Anti Cheat > Detection: Hacked Hypervisor
  • Anti Cheat > Detection:Virtual Environments
  • Anti Cheat > Detection:HWID
  • Windows Security Features

Threat Model

External DMA Cheat Architecture

A modern external DMA cheat consists of three components:

1. Cheat PC — runs the cheat application, signature databases,
   aim assistance, ESP rendering, and a network/USB link to the gaming PC.

2. DMA Card — an FPGA-based PCIe endpoint installed in the gaming PC
   (typically M.2 NVMe slot). Exposes a memory-read/write interface to
   the cheat PC. Uses Bus Master capability to issue Memory Read TLPs
   against the gaming PC's RAM.

3. Actuator (optional) — a USB HID emulator (microcontroller-based) that
   injects keyboard/mouse input on the gaming PC according to commands
   from the cheat PC, closing the loop.

The structural property that makes this threat distinctive:
no attacker code executes on the gaming PC. The DMA card performs
hardware-level transactions between the FPGA and the gaming PC's
memory controller, mediated by the chipset and (when configured) the IOMMU.
The gaming PC's OS, drivers, and anti-cheat see only a PCIe device
announcing itself through Configuration Space and performing what looks
like ordinary DMA.

Three Defense Layers

Layer              Mechanism                    What It Catches
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
PCIe-layer         Inspect Config Space &        Identity mismatch — spoofed
fingerprinting     behavior at the bus level     device that doesn't match
                                                 real silicon's full signature

IOMMU              Use the IOMMU to bound        Out-of-domain DMA — device
enforcement        what physical memory the       trying to read game memory
                   device can touch               it wasn't allocated

External           TPM-anchored measured boot,   Boot-chain compromise — IOMMU
attestation        cloud-verified                or kernel itself subverted

Read the full file on GitHub · 1,782 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 1,782 lines · 70 tokens per session scan A 4c6f8ee00a51

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dma-attack-techniques is a skill published in the GitHub repository gmh5225/awesome-game-security (3,491 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 70 tokens to every session and 16,671 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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