In what ways can a Steam dedicated server access PlayFab APIs?

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Jørgen Havsberg Seland asked Jan 16, '20

In what ways can a Steam dedicated server access PlayFab APIs?

In our games, we have official and player-run dedicated servers.

For official servers, whose hardware we control, accessing PlayFab APIs can be done via a secret.

For unofficial servers, we do not know if there is any way of accessing PlayFab APIs, as secrets are not a viable option when players control the hardware.

Are there any existing, recommended approaches for this use-case?

apis Authentication

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Answer 1 · 2020-01-17T02:33:56Z

Citrus Yan answered Jan 17, '20

Do you mean that for unofficial servers, players can potentially see the secret because they can control the hardware and see underlying communications? Can you share more details about the unofficial servers, like how players control them? what kind of tasks do they perform?

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Jørgen Havsberg Seland commented · Jan 20, 2020 at 08:50 AM

Unofficial servers are UE4 dedicated servers.

The players run them with SteamCmd, in the same way as Ark does.

This means they can potentially see the secret because they control the hardware.

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Citrus Yan Jørgen Havsberg Seland commented · Jan 21, 2020 at 09:25 AM

If that's the case, you may need to consider only using Client APIs for unofficial servers, and, for other features that entail server/admin APIs, you may need a custom server controlled by you to handle this.

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Jørgen Havsberg Seland Citrus Yan commented · Jan 24, 2020 at 10:38 AM

Can steam server credentials be used to authenticate with PlayFab in the same way as steam user credentials can? AFAIK, steam servers use an anonymous authentication scheme where they are not tied to a specific steam user.

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Jørgen Havsberg Seland commented · Jan 29, 2020 at 11:18 AM

I appear to have used ambiguous wording when asking my question.

We do not require access to the PlayFab Server API, the PlayFab Client API is sufficient.

The question is that of how to authenticate the Steam dedicated server running on a player's hardware with *any* PlayFab API.

We have one inelegant solution that will work:

In our game, we can allow the player to link a username+password combination to their PlayFab account.
The player sets up a Steam dedicated server locally.
The player enters their username+password combination into the dedicated server's configuration files.
The dedicated server uses this information to authenticate with PlayFab as the player and gains access to the client APIs (which are sufficient for what we want to accomplish).

I am sure this will work. Is there any other, Steam-specific way of authenticating with PlayFab, some kind of "steam server SSO" option?

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franklinchen Jørgen Havsberg Seland commented · Jan 30, 2020 at 06:08 AM

If the username and password you mentioned above is PlayFab's login credential, I think this is the only way to authenticate with PlayFab on Client side. But I want to ask how you "link a username+password combination to their PlayFab account"? Have you added random salt and encrypted them?

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