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Valve opens its network relay infrastructure reducing latency and protecting the DoS to all developers using its Steamworks platform.
A few years ago, large scale denial of service attacks against gaming servers were becoming more commonplace and becoming more common in online gaming and eSports. To protect its own games, Valve has been working for several years to develop a network infrastructure that makes the system more resistant to denial of service attacks and reduces latency, and the company uses this system at a time. Dota 2 and CS: GO.
Through 30 different sites around the world, Valve has established relay servers that route network traffic between clients and servers. These relay points offer DoS resiliency in several ways. They are equipped with a total of several terabits of bandwidth, which allows them to handle a certain amount of flood in all cases. Games can also switch from one relay to another without necessarily interrupting their connection. This switching can be done to another relay in the same place or even to another point of presence.
The relay also allows Valve to hide the IP address of the game server and the IP addresses of the clients connected to the server. This prevents direct attacks against another person on the same server.
The Valve system also makes decisions on how to route the traffic. The company has a private primary network with over 2,500 ISPs worldwide, used for both Steam downloads and network traffic games. It prioritizes network traffic over downloads. Customers can estimate the latency between two endpoints via relays without having to send traffic between these endpoints, allowing them to decide which point of presence to use to ensure the best time to reply. According to Valve, this allowed 43% of players to see their ping time decrease, 10% of them noting an improvement of 40 ms or more.
In addition, Valve operates STUN / TURN servers, which provide a reliable way for machines behind firewalls and network address translation systems to send and receive network traffic.
This relay system is now available to any developer who builds a game using the Valve Steamworks toolbox. The underlying network protocol, without the relay, has been open source for some time. Like many custom network protocols (such as the future HTTP / 3), it relies on the lightweight and unreliable User Datagram Protocol (UDP) rather than the more complex but reliable Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). custom reliability functions top of the UDP layer. The protocol is encrypted and handles most of the tasks required to create a reliable UDP transmission, making it useful even without the Steamworks relay features.
Like a Dota 2 fan, I can say that Valve's network work seems to have done the job admirably. For a while, attacks were a common feature of the professional scene, with many professional games being disrupted as players and servers were inundated with traffic. These same attacks seem to have completely disappeared.
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