Security

This page describes the current status of security in AAGRINDER.

Authentication

In AAGRINDER, users authenticate with their passwords. The password is chosen when the account is created and needs to be at least 1 character long. The password may contain any characters.

The password is transmitted to the server in plaintext. However, if you are using a https connection, this transmission will be encrypted.

On the server, the password is hashed and salted using bcryptjs and then saved in a MySQL database. The relevant part of the code can be found here. The plaintext password does not persist in memory on neither the client or the server.

Users can change their passwords by using the /passwd client command in-game. It is also possible to change the password with a direct api call. In both cases, the current password is required in order to set a new one. If you lost your current password, you should contact the server administrator.

There is currently no functionality for changing an account's password. If you want your password changed, you should contact the server administrator to reset your account (progress in the game will not be lost).

There is an alternative mode called insecure mode which can be enabled by toggling a server setting. We call it "insecure" to decrease the confusion between the similar words "authentication" and "authorization". If enabled, passwords will be completely ignored at login, and the client will not prompt the user for password.

Authorization

Additional privileges may be granted to specific users at login.

Among the in-game commands that get executed on the server, some are in the group of admin commands, which prevents users from accessing these commands unless they have the admin role. The names of users with the admin role are specified in the file admins.txt in the server directory. This file needs to be edited manually.

An additional privilege may be granted to users which allows them to run the /sudo command. To do this, the server setting allow_sudo needs to be set to true and the name of the user needs to be specified in the file sudo.txt in the server directory. This file needs to be edited manually.

It is possible to turn off authorization for admin commands, by changing the server setting authorization to false. Then, all players are allowed to run admin commands, regardless of the content of admins.txt. However, access to the /sudo command remains restricted.