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Comment by josefx | Hacker News Reader

> whereas games only run themselves.

Until you run multiplayer and are suddenly dealing with hostile players, servers and possible mods.

I would love to hear about an implementation of multiplayer that receives code from hostile opponents and executes it, but I do not anticipate you'll find many examples.

Ever heard of a game called "Call of Duty"?

> SV_SteamAuthClient in various Activision Infinity Ward Call of Duty games before 2015-08-11 is missing a size check when reading authBlob data into a buffer, which allows one to execute code on the remote target machine when sending a steam authentication request. This affects Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Call of Duty: Black Ops 1, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2018-2081...

In case this needs to be pointed out, an RCE in a game is an accident, not the way they designed their multiplayer to work. I was describing why the Firefox team might wait for a feature to be security-hardened before releasing it. The answer remains the same -- they design and market the thing to be secure even when it executes untrusted code. Activision does not advertise their games as able to "securely execute RCE gadgets from maliciously crafted steam authentication packets". This part may be surprising: the Chrome and Firefox teams do, in fact, try to ensure that when someone gains RCE, that they execute it securely and it can't get very far.

I am not attempting to claim that games do not have security issues or cannot experience remote code execution, just that this is not a normal pattern of behaviour that they plan for, so it is normal that a game author would deploy wgpu long before Firefox does (while Firefox spends a lot of effort on fuzzing, etc). If anything a terrible CVE that Activision has expended apparently zero resources fixing is a very good example of what I'm talking about.

Understood. I should not have been snarky; I'm sorry. I think the CoD CVE is worth noting in this thread though.

No need to apologise! You got me pretty good.

With the amount of visible bugs that every game is released with nowadays, there are easily as many security bugs.

Depending on the game, it downloads maps, skins, etc. from the server... File parsing code is highly suspectible to security bugs.

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