Top Secret WoW Anti-cheater program = Warden

nearly 2 year old article:

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=127684



i thought you would have already known about the warden.

 

who cares?

 

this thing has been around for ages and long known about, in fact blizzard have admitted to it.

 

yeah but they dont comment on it, they are completely hush hush about it to the point of not even providing proof of exploiting to people who get banned.  I guess to protect the integrity of Warden, so i guess it is exploitable if players knew how it caught cheaters.

 

I worry, from time to time, that every time I open up WoW it's scanning **** it's not supposed to. And yeah, it's an upsetting thought, but in the end, I have just enough trust that whatever they're reporting back to Blizzard doesn't have any personally identifying information about what I've got going on in the background. With handling the financials not just of personal accounts but of some companies as well, my biggest worry is that it's sitting there reading keystrokes or memory spaces of other programs not to run signature checks or heuristic checks (a la anti-viruses) against known entries, but instead copying those entire blocks and sending the results to Blizzard.

In the end, if this becomes a significant worry of mine, what I can always do is run WoW inside a sandboxed VM (perhaps something like Blue Pill could do this without overly taxing the system and utilizing VT instructions available on my Intel Core 2 Duo?) that doesn't allow it to read anything outside of it's space during the course of runtime. Sure, this is probably a violation of the Blizzard EULA and grounds for banning, but if I come to find out it's reading address spaces where I have important and non-executable data, and I have reasonable suspicions that it's copying out of these spaces and sending the results back? It may come down to Blizzard violating privacy laws, acting unreasonably within the restrictions I've set for it (WoW never runs as Administrator for a reason), and hell, maybe even forming a class-action lawsuit against Blizzard would be in the works at that point.

Warden probably exhibits dramatically different behavior than, say, Punkbuster or VAC does. It runs within the user's access level, and as such only has access to what the user has to access, which is a big plus. Doesn't require administrative access either, so there's no worrying that Warden is popping SYSTEM or root (much like VAC does, but quite unlike Punkbuster, which now runs as a service in Windows). So if push comes to shove, I could always force WoW to run as a lesser-privileged user than even what I run as now (runas to a limited user account, maybe even guest?) and still be able to operate it and hopefully be secure in the knowledge that it would have absolutely no access to the memory spaces, regardless of the status of such, of other users on the system. Considering I've yet to be banned while my brother, who runs with a limited user account (versus my power user account) this may be a good practice for anyone to take if they fear Warden's going too far and could possibly compromise your security protocols.

This is, of course, assuming that Windows XP SP2 goes to such lengths to ensure data security. For all we know, a limited user account might not restrict programs running as the user from reading the memory data structures of other users, especially said read/write non-executable structures.

 

i didn't read the article you linked because warden isn't a secret so i assume you must just be dumb

 

They aren't hiding it and have talked about it probably 2 years ago?

You're still on dial-up aren't you?

 

Alot of you are retarded.  Did you even read the article?  Have you seen Blizzard's stance on bannings, and them being completely top secret about how Warden works to catch cheaters?

Youre going to tell me they are completely open about Warden when they wont comment on it, while every other mmorpg company doesnt seem to have an issue talking about it?

When you get past 2nd grade, then you can comment on my blogs.  Maybe then you'll l2read stuff before commenting like idiots.  As for not caring dont read it then...

 

Could they release details of how Warden works without giving would-be cheaters information that would help them circumvent the program?