Real Flaws in Virtual Worlds

Real Flaws in Virtual Worlds
Federico Biancuzzi, 2007-12-20

Massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), such as World of Warcraft, have millions of subscribers interacting online, which makes security tricky business.

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Follow-up: the case of Guild Wars? 2007-12-20
Anonymous (1 replies)

Hi there,

Interesting article and I'll make sure to read the book too.

I wonder whether the authors spoke about the MMORPG Guild Wars, by Anet, which is rather secure by design.

Furthermore, it'd be interesting to discuss the issue of next-gen attacks such as botting, as a threat to the gam...

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Re: Follow-up: the case of Guild Wars? 2007-12-28
gem (1 replies)

Hi,

We don't have much coverage of guild wars in the book, though we do have coverage of some games outside of WoW.

There are two chapters on botting, both of which include extensive code examples.

gem

company www.cigital.com
podcast www.cigital.com/silverbullet
blog www.cigital.com/ju...

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Re: Follow-up: the case of Guild Wars? 2008-01-03
Trend (1 replies)

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I already ordered a copy of the book. Interestingly, I'm playing GW and mentioned your work on a GW forum (www.guildwarsguru.com), and someone who met you once highlighted the quality of your work.

I think that GW could have had a chapter of its own, because it has su...

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Re: Re: Follow-up: the case of Guild Wars? 2008-01-03
gem

Honestly? Probably not. We picked WoW because of its market share (around 52%). Also, their architecture is more standard...and as you alluded to in your posting, a big problem from a security perspective. Keeping security-critical state data on the server is good. Kudos to GW for apparently d...

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Real Flaws in Virtual Worlds 2008-01-17
Robert

I've been playing online games for years and have noticed the hacks, bots and chats. Usually you can spot them and some games have tried to fix that. Hero online will ask you a simple question like "whats 2+5" and you have to answer it. I'm not sure how well that works but its an interesting idea...

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Real Flaws in Virtual Worlds 2008-01-18
Queue (1 replies)

Guild Wars uses a Diablo 2 Battle.net model; the text-based lobby of D2 is simply replaced with a 3D graphical meeting area (like, say, a town) where you party up then play purely instanced content with a small group. This is why most data is controlled by the server; because it only has to be synch...

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Re: Real Flaws in Virtual Worlds 2008-01-28
Trend

In essence, you're right. GW is not like WoW or other MMORPGs, though it can be seen as a hybrid. But this is not the point here, whether ORPG or MMORPG, its software architecture make it less prone to hacking in general. Though it's well known that there are bugs, but I wouldn't put them at the sam...

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