Get Involved

You may help us in documenting Paltalk protocols in several ways. I'll show you some of them.

Be careful about licensing of Paltalk products and services. For example it is up to you to determine if reversing PaltakScene client is illegal. I have no responsibility about these legal stuff!

After you got started, join us and contribute the results. If you found out something that you didn't know where in the wiki it should go, put it in Information Pool.

Studying Gaim-PT

Study Gaim-PT source code and extract protocol details.

Analyzing Network Traffic

Analyze network traffic between the official Paltalk clients and Paltalk servers.

You have two options:

Patch Wireshark and Use It

Apply the patch found in tools to Wireshark source code:

$ tar xf wireshark-1.0.3.tar.gz
$ 7z x wireshark-1.0.3-paltalk.diff.7z
$ cd wireshark-1.0.3
$ patch -p1 <../wireshark-1.0.3-paltalk.diff
$ ./configure && make && sudo make install

Now you should be able to find «Paltalk» in Expression dialog of Wireshark.

Use Unpatched Wireshark or Any Other Traffic Dumper

First of all you need to dump TCP traffic passing between client and server. I use Wireshark to do this:

First start capturing from your network interface and then start PaltalkScene and do whatever you'd like in it. Now exit PaltalkScene and end Wireshark capturing.

Find the TCP session between PaltalkScene and Paltalk server and select "Follow TCP Stream". At bottom of the just opened window select each direction separately instead of "Entire conversation" and save them in separate raw files, e.g. paltalk-send.raw and paltalk-recv.raw.

Now you can study the traffic, and Paltalk Dump Formatter may help you.

Reverse Engineering Official Binaries

Reverse engineer executable of the official Paltalk client

Reverse engineering can specially help in extracting algorithms, e.g. encryption algorithms.

Just use your favorite tools to study PaltalkScene executable.

My favorite executable studying tools are IDA Pro and OllyDbg.

I'm not going to teach reversing here! So if you already don't know how to do it, find yourself a good tutorial to get started.

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