Anet's GW: a (relatively) secure MMORPG

Hi there,

An interesting read for anyone that is knowledgeable in software&security (be careful, some information could be seriously misinterpreted if you're not familiar with this):
http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/461/4

What's striking (well, not so much if you thought about these questions before) is that Anet's design of GW is pretty solid against these "first line of attack" threats, since the (untrusted) client contains nothing of value. The problem of software bugs is inherent to any software (unless it's been coded following formal methods) But GW immediately releases patched code transparently to all clients anyway, and that is a huge improvement.

On the other hand, any superior design will bring about new threats and a "second line of attack": botting, spamming and duping. I believe that even on this front, Anet's doing an excellent job, banning daily these scammers, though some "false positives" have probably caused some pain in legitimate users.

I've been happily surprised by Anet's reaction to mods and GWLP, which is very mature (don't disallow it until you've got reasons to believe it'll harm your business model). That's the kind of decision that comes from a deep and correct understanding of software security as a whole (cracking the code on the client and interface side is ALWAYS possible technically, but it's rather a matter of law after the point where it's been broken).

One aspect I'd like to see improved in GW2 is the use of crypto. From what I've read on the creation of GWLP, it seems that the symmetric key was obtained fairly easily, which means that communication could be compromised fairly easily (which will probably not give an advantage to anyone, apart from preventing people to connect to the game, or possibly add some lag to their connection?).

Well, now feel free to share the info you've got on GW design in this thread.

P.S.: (an old) bad news for Blizzard(-Activision) which makes you happy as a GW/Anet customer:
http://www.rootkit.com/newsread.php?newsid=371

I'm wondering why people are having hundreds of armbraces?

What a brilliant point you're making (I, too, can use irony as a method for answering without really answering). I'm wondering why people have been banned for selling and buying armbraces?

It's (relatively) secure. Anyone who knows about programmin languages, compilers and OS architecture knows that bugs can't be avoided. The create vulnerabilities that can then potentially be exploited to do bad things. A buffer overflow in the client can crash your game (no pb with GW's architecture, there's no critical info in the client) but a buffer overflow in the server will enable duping. And software engineers know that buffer overflow is not the most complicated problem.

There are times where you wish that people would weight their words against "silence" (not posting these words). You're entitled to your opinion, but when your words express next to nothing, we're walking backwards.

Relatively secure.

Where does that place GW among other online games?

What is the most secure game?

GW and WoW are not mutually exclusive, I play both. So the warden can see if I'm browsing porn, big deal. It still can't read secure data and who checks their bank account while playing an online game anyway? That looks pretty old , seeing as the subscription figures for WoW are double that now.

Well, thanks to its server-oriented design, it's ahead of the pack. See the article in my original post.

I'd be interested to know if WoW has many bugs of the first (crash, glitch) and second (bot, duping) types.

Yeah, that point is roughly discussed in the discussion attached to the article. It still is a breach of trust (Warden should have been mentioned from the start), though that does not mean you shouldn't be playing WoW. Problems can happen if other programs read the info that Warden has, but I'm unsure if this possible or hasn't done before?

On the first, not for me. Never crashed once, never had a major glitch other than the usual clipping that seems to be par for the course with all MMOs. Also it now has multi processor support, so I don't have to put up with it crashing on a quad core machine (which GW does a lot).

On the second, riddled with 'em probably. There's certainly at least one lvl 1 Orc gold seller in Orgrimmar every time I go there.

It's an irritating price that comes with success.

Not sure how it was brought in initially, but I'm pretty sure when I installed it came up as a separate part of the 'push Agree to play' screen, maybe someone else can confirm that. When you agree to the EULA in WoW you have to scroll to the bottom or the button is greyed out. People can always decline, though why they're surprised when they can't log in afterwards I'll never know.

Don't you mean Fury?

kekekeke

I think GW has a good basis.
Created by the minds behind battlenet, they aimed to create a secure, bandwidth efficient architecture.

...
In a world were personal liberty is surrendered left right and centre in the interests of "counter terrorism", draconian 1984-esque governments, and general corporation data-mining, it concerns me that you have such a blasé attitude towards data protection.

Game companies monitoring background exes, sony music software installing rootkits, what's next?

Dogs installing cameras to make sure you don't fraternize with the Black Lab next door? (It's the only logical next step)

Rights to privacy are becoming more flimsy each year...

there will always be bug in game, just the nature of the beast. But it always seemed to me that anet never reallly has a good rep with the bug fixes. There are numerous examples, for instance, the even growing list of typos, i would assume would be easy to fix. Or the fact that when favor is lost, it still has two messages. These might be minor, but when it major issues, anet just is completely off the ball. The duping event only was stoped after players submited the method to them on a silver plater. In the bug fixed part, I feel anet needs to improve.

the irony is it runs on Microsoft Server 2003 or 2005

a lot of things are underground so you won't find about them until it is too late.

GW's architecture is inherently more secure than any other current MMO that I know of. However, being the "minds behind battlenet" is definitely NOT a positive credential for having good security. As any player of D2 will tell you, battlenet's security initially resembled swiss cheese (and the WoW players will tell you that it's still not too great). If anything, the evolution from b-net to a-net is best described as "learning from your mistakes."

I could not possibly agree more. If one are not deeply troubled by recent erosions of privacy, that can only be because one is ignorant of what is going on.

For the sake of those who wish to educate themselves:
I think the book plugged by the article OP links to describes addresses the narrow field of spyware from PC games (though I have not myself read it).
To learn about the problems with private-sector privacy violations, particularly corporate data mining, and the problems with the legal system failing to adapt to them, I strongly recommend The Digital Person by Daniel Solove.
The full extent of governmental invasions of privacy is both disturbing and classified, and I know of no source which discusses them adequately.

Can't be done.

If client is to make use of data sent by server, it needs to be able to decode the traffic completely. As such, client has full knowledge of how to decode data - and client is available to all.

Encryption is just a minor hassle and never the strong point when both parties possess both, the algorithm and the keys. It's a deterrent, not prevention.

Most commonly, encryption is more useful for client detection and data integrity check, not that much as a prevention measure.

Consider texmod - textures can be completely encrypted with military grade algorithms, but texmod listens to data sent to graphics card (which cannot be encrypted). In the same way, if network traffic were too encrypted, people would just run the client, and read data directly from memory, once the game has decoded it.

It doesn't. Just the SQL database, the rest is custom code.

As of a recent upgrade, it can do that too. It doesn't currently, but it's capable of doing that. It's even possible for it to take a screenshot on a remote request.

What's worst, it's potentially possible to hijack the warden by a third party hacker, who can then use it as a back door. But I'm not sure how far people have gotten with that.

Windows sending a list of installed software (including all the licenses or lack of them), movies and mp3s you have to Microsoft's servers once a day, and shutting down the system remotely if they choose? Although I hear they increased the interval to 2 weeks now. Apparently some people complained about that antiquated thing called privacy.

But yea... Big brother is watching right now.

Yes! You can't hurt something thats already dead, or in this case, youcan't hack a game that's really, really bad, oh and offline.

Rip AA may the industry learn from your wrongness.