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Under the Surface of Azeroth:
A Network Baseline and Security Analysis
of Blizzard's World of Warcraft
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Introduction
Blizzard's World of Warcraft gaming franchise has become the most popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) in history. World of Warcraft's popularity has dramatically changed the gaming industry, and Blizzard is clearly one of the industry's most successful online gaming companies.
From a technology perspective, the numbers generated by the World of Warcraft gaming universe are staggering. Blizzard maintains over two-hundred (and counting) "realms," each representing a self-contained role-playing world that's separate from the others. It's estimated
With this huge quantity of subscribers, it's not difficult to imagine that there may be an adventurer who occasionally takes advantage of the corporate or college network to acquire a few additional experience points. But does this World of Warcraft activity on a public network pose a security risk for the end user? Should the usage of World of Warcraft across the network be a concern for an enterprise network administrator? Does the World of Warcraft game client pose a risk to enterprise security?
I've put World of Warcraft through its paces in the lab and examined the interactions across the network and inside of my computer systems. I'll show you the results of this analysis, including an overview of the information transferred to Blizzard's servers, the traffic patterns and flows used by World of Warcraft, and the security advantages and disadvantages of playing World of Warcraft on your home or business network.
