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Official Map Upload Service (?)

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Can we get an official map upload service from Blizzard? (Heck at this point even a custom client on private servers would get my attention)

I mean one that would provide for each map an encryption key, known only to Blizzard (or the private client) and the map author, so the maps are encrypted (same way Blizzard sign their maps). Ofc this would mean a more dynamic updating system should be invented too (in case of custom client this would be pz ez), but updating some keys shouldn't be a problem in such system. Unless you need to re-download whole game each time, which again shouldn't be the case.

Pros
  • No thieving of people's work
  • No need to move to different platforms to have your work secured
  • No need of use of 3rd party programs that are unreliable and break the map.
  • No waste of time of mappers on inventing and coming up with protection ideas and systems, that won't work, rather focusing on actually creating a better experience
  • People can ask the author if they wanna learn something promoting social interaction.

Cons
  • Some people might be forced to actually ask for an author's permission before ripping their work and from my understand, that's frowned upon.
 
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@TheLordOfChaos201 Expected more of the usual nonsense of "its not feasible" (as if they are talking to illiterates), "how will I learn how to copy paste your work" (as if you can't ask for help) etc of the same old bs.

I thought Blizzard was around here or something, did they just left?
 
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@TheLordOfChaos201 Expected more of the usual nonsense of "its not feasible" (as if they are talking to illiterates), "how will I learn how to copy paste your work" (as if you can't ask for help) etc of the same old bs.

I thought Blizzard was around here or something, did they just left?
oh... are they?

sorry I wouldn't really know but if they are around I haven't heard about them

hmm...

good luck I guess
 
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Does not matter what you do, as long as the game can read it, so can we.
Game can read it using the key in wc3 (which you don't know), you can't unless you have the key. Its called cryptography.

Blizzard already does it to sign their maps, they have a key. Otherwise bnet would be swarmed with fake blizzard maps.
 

pyf

pyf

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I thought Blizzard was around here or something, did they just left?
oh... are they?

sorry I wouldn't really know but if they are around I haven't heard about them

brad_c6.jpg
 
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Chaosy

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Game can read it using the key in wc3 (which you don't know), you can't unless you have the key. Its called cryptography.

Blizzard already does it to sign their maps, they have a key. Otherwise bnet would be swarmed with fake blizzard maps.

Yeah things have never been decrypted before.
They can make it harder, yes.

But for what really? to (to some extent) prevent exposure of a few fan made triggers?
If Blizzard does something for wc3, please ask them for something useful.
Like accessing armor/sight range/damage and so on, with triggers.
That would benefit way more people, even if only indirectly.
 
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~El

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Game can read it using the key in wc3 (which you don't know), you can't unless you have the key. Its called cryptography.

Blizzard already does it to sign their maps, they have a key. Otherwise bnet would be swarmed with fake blizzard maps.

If you have the game client, you have the key. It's a matter of finding where it is. This isn't security through cryptography, this is security through obscurity.

It's different from signing something. Signing typically works by having a public/private key scheme, where you use the private key to sign something, and then use the public key to verify that it's signed by the private key.

The client, however, cannot -decrypt- a map without having the private key for it. If the game client can decrypt it, it's only a matter of time until someone finds the private key and extracts it out of the game client.

Please, study your cryptography.
 
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@Chaosy
Even tho its hard, you can do all that already. Would be nice to have it made easy, yes. But what is nicer is to have something I can't achieve in any other way, like security.

@Sir Moriarty
At least maps can't have fake authors this way but even so there are solutions for each problem you mentioned, what is needed is a dynamic client "update" system.
 
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~El

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@Chaosy
Even tho its hard, you can do all that already. Would be nice to have it made easy, yes. But what is nicer is to have something I can't achieve in any other way, like security.

@Sir Moriarty
At least maps can't have fake authors this way but even so there are solutions for each problem you mentioned, what is needed is a dynamic client "update" system.

Sure. It can solve some of the problems. If by a dynamic client "update" system you mean a system whereas you constantly change the encryption keys, it is hardly a good solution.
  • The official service will need to re-encrypt maps each time the key is updated. Now imagine there are tens, hundreds thousands of maps that need to be re-encrypted on a regular basis. That's a lot of processing power for a feature that hardly protects anything.
  • Even if the encryption key changes, I can theoretically lock myself to a specific version and decrypt all the maps that I have for that version. Sure, it prevents newer versions from being broken quickly, but only temporarily.
  • Once the location of the key has been found once, it is much easier to extract it from future releases. There is one way to mitigate this - and it is to change the code with each release significantly enough that it takes significant time for someone to circumvent it again. But it is only a temporary solution.
All of that effort for a "protection" scheme that can be relatively easily bypassed each time with relatively little effort, for a game that is 15 years old, with a very small playerbase. Are you seeing the problem here? It's hardly worth it, from a corporate perspective, to invest time, money and resources into this. We can't even coax basic features out of Blizzard, that'd benefit the community (and the game, itself) much more than this, and you're asking for something like that.

Hell, you don't even need to find the private key. Just find the moment when the game client decrypts the map, and steal it from there. All it requires is a few days of work by a single adequate reverse-engineer, at most, and their scheme is circumvented.

I'm sorry, but if this was a viable protection scheme, we'd see it used everywhere in software, not just games. All kind of software would just "decrypt" a bit of code downloaded externally and run it... except nobody does it, because it's so very easy to circumvent.

Sorry, but this is not going to happen in the way you imagine it.

The only real benefit of having an official map-upload service is that there's always going to be a place where you can download the latest, verified version of a map made by the author. But it doesn't offer you any security, just verification that it is legitimate.

EDIT:
What would be a viable solution to the thieving problem, however, is separate formats map for the editor and the game. Blizzard originally did not intend for any protection schemes at all, and this is clearly reflected in how the editor works - w3x and w3m files are just archives with a bunch of files in them, and by default, editor-specific data is still included in the playable map file, even if it isn't used.

This is how protectors work - they remove that editor-specific data, leaving only the data needed to run the map in-game. This leaves out GUI triggers, unit placement, and some other things that make deprotecting a map a hassle - but you can still extract a lot out of it, because you can substitute the missing data with enough skill and knowledge.

If they made a game-specific "baked" map format, and made some changes to the engine, you could potentially push this even further, like pre-compiling JASS into bytecode, essentially protecting triggers from being stolen. Sure, you can still probably write a deprotector, but you won't be able to rip content from maps that easily anymore, due to the sheer difference between the two formats.

The biggest benefit would be, however, an opportunity to optimize map sizes and loading times if it was shipped with WE by default. The official service would store both the editor version, and the game version, and it would also solve the problem of mapmakers losing backups of their maps.

Yet, once again, this is a lot of effort for a game that's hardly played anymore.
 
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