[Coco] Anyone still play text adventure games?

[Aaron Wolfe]

Ok...  I think I must have given the wrong impression of what Bedlam
is doing or how it works.

Although a telnet client is used to play the game, the server is NOT
any kind of "telnet server" in the traditional sense.  We aren't
allowing logins to system accounts, we aren't providing shells, Bedlam
is not a process that runs in (or as) a shell for a user... nothing
like that at all.  In fact, Bedlam doesn't even process the Telnet
protocol, there is no processing of the telnet protocol/control
sequences whatsoever.  The only reason we use a telnet client to play
the game is that telnet clients are a really easy way to send and
receive bytes that represent plain text information.

Bedlam is simply a process that reads and writes bytes to TCP sockets,
just like any other program that uses TCP (web browsers, web servers,
email clients, email servers, etc etc).    There is no way to break
out of the telnet session because there is no telnet session.  Players
are never logged in to the server in any way.  Bedlam is just a
process reading and writing bytes to sockets.

You could write a "Bedlam Network Client" in about 3 lines of Perl
(probably could be done in a single line by a perlmonger :)    The
network client example in O'Reilly's "Programming Perl" would do fine.
 If removing the telnet client from the equation will help to reduce
concern, I could provide such a thing.

As for the security implications of setting up a port forward, if we
assume a properly configured NAT rule, I am unaware of any technique
that would allow the public to do anything other than communicate with
the Bedlam process.   The Bedlam process is a fairly simple bit of
code that uses standard and well tested open source network I/O
libraries.  If there are security issues with the network routines
that Bedlam uses, then at least they are shared with a massive library
of much more commonplace and important software.

TL;DR - A Bedlam server is extremely unlikely to be the least secure
part of even a very well maintained network.

-Aaron



On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 11:38 AM, John Kent <jekent at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> Or if there was some way of breaking out of the telnet session.
>
> On 25/05/2011 1:35 AM, John Kent wrote:
>>
>> That was pretty much my understanding of it too, but I was concerned that
>> if I used port forwarding on my router to a specific IP address on the
>> subnet, whether there was some way to gain access to my local area network,
>> by redirecting packets off the device in some manner say via some other port
>> which might be open.
>>
>>
>
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