DEF CON 17 - Bruce Potter and Logan Lodge - Fragging Game Servers
Channel: DEFCONConference
Date: 21/11/2013

Fragging Game Servers
Bruce Potter Founder - The Shmoo Group
Logan Lodge TFT Ninja

Every day, security professionals do battle the trenches; good vs. evil, whitehats vs. blackhats, our network vs their l337 tools. And what do we do to unwind after work? For many of us, it's doing battle in the trenches with terrorists, Nazi's, and that pesky Blue team that keeps stealing our intelligence.

Video games are a multi-billion dollar industry that rivals the movie industry in size. And recently, many games have taken a decidedly online tone. People from all over the world meet up on servers every day to meet, frag, and respawn into the wee hours of the morning. But what about the security of these servers? How secure are they, and how does the underlying integrity of these servers effect you and your ability to blow up other players?

From hardware interaction to network protocols, this talk will present the inner workings of the Source Dedicated Server (used for games such as Left4Dead and Team Fortress 2). This talk will discuss some of the weaknesses in these game engines and ways they are exploited in the wild. A tool designed to dissect and analyze client/server communications will be released during the talk. We'll also provide some pragmatic advice for deploying game servers and release a white paper describing a secure configuration guidelines for the Source Dedicated Server.

Bruce Potter is the founder of the Shmoo Group of security, crypto, and privacy professionals. He is also the co-founder and CTO of Ponte Technologies, a company focused on developing and deploying advanced IT defensive technologies. His areas of expertise include wireless security, network analysis, trusted computing, pirate songs, reusing bios, and restoring hopeless vehicles. Mr. Potter has co-authored several books and writes monthly articles for "Network Security".

Logan Lodge is a TF2 ninja. His rocket jumping skills help him reign death from above on unsuspecting noobs. When he's not busy fragging, Logan is a software developer with an overwhelming love of python and all things AMD. Logan has mad traffic analysis foo and prefers Postgres to MySQL. 

For copies of the slides and additional materials please see the DEF CON 17 Archive here: https://defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives/dc-17-archive.html