Communicating with an MT4 server

I apologize if this is the wrong sub-forum to post. If I remember from some time ago there used to be a programmer's sub-forum ?

in any case, I am programming an A.I. trading agent on linux using C++, boost & other linux libraries, with neural nets, r-learning, bayesian nets, genetic programming, svm's, etc.
The agent has two purposes, one is to be trained to predict intraday movements.
The second is to learn to trade intraday without any user input.

My issue is communicating with MT4 servers. MT4 client seems to be communicating on port 443 on remote server, but is not SSL or HTTPS (although windows monitor reports it as HTTPS).

I found a few articles on stackoverflow suggesting that I reverse engineer the protocol, but my RE skills are elementary. I have also done some DLL and codecave injection, but I am unsure as to what to hook on MT4 in order to find all the nessesary commands to the MT4 server.

Basically I am looking for: obtaining OCHL prices & timestamps, placing orders commands (buy/sell/SL/TP), connecting as specific user/pass.

So, does anyone have any kind of information or documentation about this ?
Does anyone know how I could inject a DLL to find about this specific information ?

I have read suggestions about using wireshark to capture network packets, and then try to analyze them, but I have no idea how to analyze them (I have a basic understanding of TCP/IP and do know how to use wireshark).
My intentions are NOT to crack MT4 or its protocol, simply to communicate with an MT4 server through this application.

Thank you

Most people write a script to capture the incoming ticks and use a DLL to write them into shared memory or a pipe. There are a number of threads in this forum and codebase that discuss this and have code samples. I have seen WireShark suggested as a data capture, but it seems to me the only advantage would be avoiding MQL coding.

I am working on a project now to try to hook the data into WCF, but it seems like a lot of effort for a little gain over pipes. From what I read the future for .NET looks grim and everything will move from applications to web services, so WCF will no longer be supported. Probably Metaquotes will be the last app to migrate though.

CodeMeister, thank you for your reply and suggestion.
However, this is a linux application, and this complicates things by much, and that is why it has to be a standalone client to an MT4 server.

MT4 comms are encrypted ... you wouldn't want anyone being able to sniff / inject your packets if you're trading with real money now would you!

Since the packets are encrypted there is no other way forward than to crack the MT4 client to obtain the encryption method - keys / protocol - and from there reversing Eng. the packets to obtain the correct way to request / send info.

That is what I was afraid of. I read somewhere that it doesn't use anything fancy I think, but still going from simple crackme's and silly protections to breaking MT4's tcp encryption, I imagine would be a daunting task.

You wouldn't happen to know of anyone who might have done it, would ya ?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...l-metatrader-4

How to read data in antivirus such as untangle to see if mt4 is exporting files or Mata data from trading server without user knollage? Must have a cert... or point of viewing in memory. Otherwise it's only on trust. Mt4 and mt5 both have platform export and community telemitry data on some outward ip's.