Ace Roqs’ Blog

While much has been said about the security failings of Windows, there is some burden on the application programmer to not put the user in a bad situation to begin with.

Perhaps the biggest violators of this contract are game programmers. They are a lazy breed when it comes to concerns ourside of gameplay. Many games require that the player run the game as Administrator. This isn’t a limit of Windows - this is due to stupid designs of many games, which do things like write player settings to the Program Files folder.

Now, I’m not flawless here. When we wrote Dead Man’s Hand we did the same stupid thing. Of course, our middleware, Unreal, did lots of silly things, like install itself to the root directory, and had certain problems with spaces in file names.

These might have been okay assumptions in the 1990 DOS era, but these days, you really should expect that companies who license middleware so widely, don’t force every licensee to fix all of the same security problems.

Now, the problem begins with the games requiring you to play as Administrator, but in order to run a dedicated game server, you need to log in. They might have some console program, or put an icon into your notification area, but the fact is, you need to be logged in as Administrator to run a dedicated server.

Think about that. Every one of the dedicated game servers based on popular games like Unreal or Quake, can be completely owned if they have the slightest buffer overrun. This includes servers run in datacenters.

Now, if these games were designed to run as services, without requiring Administrator privileges, then the servers are much more flexible and can be more secure. The changes to make this happen are trivial.

I’m not sure why we don’t demand more from our game makers. If there was an outcry from gamers about having to run as Administrator, things would be fixed pretty quickly.

Until then, we can just blame it on Windows.
We weren’t completely complacent on Dead Man’s Hand. We did do things like compile with SafeSEH and buffer overrun detection. We also rolled our own GameSpy code, and used the latest zlib, unlike many other developers. When a bunch of Unreal games were found to be exploitable in 2004, Dead Man’s Hand was not among those affected. Some of those games are still exploitable.

Still, I’d feel much better if you didn’t need to run as Administrator. In hindsight, I should have been more proactive about the issue. But, that was hardly Dead Man’s Hand’s biggest problem. One day, I’ll explain why you can’t install the game to the W: drive.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 14th, 2005 at 11:00 am and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.