# Network Safety in TADS

Starting with version 3.1, TADS offers several networking features in the interpreter. Networking creates a certain amount of risk, since the whole point is to enable data transfer between distant machines whose owners don't know each other personally.

Some people are justifiably nervous about running applications with any sort of networking features. TADS therefore gives the user control over how much, if any, network access is available to the game program. This section explains how these "network safety" features work. We also offer some analysis of why we think the TADS networking features are relatively safe by design, to help you decide on appropriate safety level settings.

## Safety level settings

You can limit the networking features that a game program can access using the "network safety level" setting. This is an interpreter feature under the end user's control; games can't override it.

There are actually two separate network safety level settings. The client level controls the game program's ability to initiate connections to other machines. For example, this applies when the game tries to establish an HTTP connection to a Web server to download a page. The server level controls the game's ability to set up services of its own that can accept connections from other machines.

For each role (client or server), there are three levels of access you can grant. The levels are given as numbers, with higher numbers meaning higher "safety" - i.e., more restricted access.

- Level 0: All network access. This is the minimum safety level; it allows unrestricted access to the network for both local and remote Internet connections.
- Level 1: Local access only. This only allows access to or from other programs on the same computer. No other machines on the network will be accessible.
- Level 2: No network access. This is the highest safety level; it completely disables the network functions.

The network safety level settings are controlled via interpreter options. The user interface varies by interpreter. In HTML TADS for Windows, the Options dialog controls these settings. For command-line interpreters, the -ns option controls the safety level. See the interpreter documentation for details.

The default safety settings are Level 1, local access only, for both client and server functions.

## Just how risky is it?

We obviously can't make blanket assurances that the TADS networking features are completely free of risk. All past experience with networked systems shows that there are always security holes and exploitable bugs. Even so, we think that the TADS network setup is relatively secure.

When you hear "Web server", you might think of the million-and-one exploitable holes in the popular Web scripting languages. You might also think of the difficulty of configuring a server like Apache, and the danger of exposing the machine to hackers if you configure it wrong.

Fortunately, The TADS Web server simply isn't comparable to those systems. Most of their common security risks don't apply to the TADS networking system.

First, for a general-purpose server like Apache, its whole purpose in life is to serve up files from your hard disk. Half of the configuration is basically to tell it what not to do. TADS takes the opposite approach: the TADS Web server doesn't answer any requests on its own. The only thing it does automatically is parse the protocol and forward requests to the game program. Everything else is up to the game program.

Second, even before the networking features came along, TADS already had a number of security features that made it safer to run third-party software on your system. TADS is a "sandboxed" system: games can't run native machine code, so they can only do what the interpreter specifically enables them to do. This means that they can't invoke the operating system directly; they can only access the OS through built-in functions and classes, which intentionally restrict which OS resources a game can access (the "file safety" settings, for example, let the user control file system access).

As we explained above, the TADS Web server doesn't do anything on its own: it's up to the game itself to handle requests. That means a TADS Web server can only do what a TADS game can do, therefore a TADS Web server is subject to the same sandboxing features as a regular TADS game.

Third, many of the common "gotchas" in server programming systems like php come from language features that aren't relevant in TADS. For example, the common php "variable injection" attack isn't possible in TADS: request parameters are cleanly isolated in an object structure, and can't "leak" into the language to impersonate variables. The php "remote include" attack isn't possible in TADS for similar reasons.

## Firewalls, proxies, security suites

If your computer is on a home network, you probably have some sort of hardware security device on the network, such as a broadband router with a firewall. If you're on a business network, you probably have a more elaborate dedicated firewall or VPN router. These devices are designed to isolate the local (home or business) network from the public Internet, to prevent hackers from outside your local network from accessing computers within your network. In addition, many people run firewall software directly on their computers to block any attacks that make it past the hardware routers and firewalls, as well as attacks that originate from other PCs within the local network.

The TADS network safety level controls are completely independent of any of these security devices or software you're using. The TADS safety level restrictions are purely additive to any external security measures. TADS can't and won't bypass, override, or reconfigure any of your other firewalls: even if you set the safety level to 0 in TADS, it doesn't remove any of the other restrictions or firewalls you have in place.

This is particularly important to understand if you want to run a TADS program that accepts connections across the Internet. Setting server safety level 0 in TADS allows the game program to create a server that can accept connections from any other machine. However, for a remote machine to connect to the game, it first has to be able to connect to your machine. Firewalls are usually set up to prevent this, by blocking incoming connections from the Internet entirely. In order to set up a game server at home, you'll probably have to specially configure your broadband router or firewall to allow incoming connections to your machine. This is beyond the scope of this chapter, so we'll have to refer you to the instruction manuals for your network boxes and/or your PC's firewall software.

TADS 3 System Manual
Table of Contents | The Intrinsics > Network Safety
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