Rivet Game Guard

Rivet Game Guard provides a layer of protection between the public internet and your game without impacting performance. You can think of like Cloudflare but for game traffic.

Game Guard serves two main purposes:

  • DDoS mitigation
  • SSL/TLS termination

Supported protocols

ProtocolRivet Game GuardHost Network (Open Source & Enterprise)
Requires single portRequires port range
HTTPS / Secure WebSocket
HTTP / WebSocket
TCP + TLS
TCP
UDP / WebRTC / ENet / KCP

DDoS mitigation

Game Guard helps mitigate DDoS attacks by:

  • Whitelisting IPs for players in the lobby
  • Enforcing max open connections per IP
  • Preventing OSI layer 3 and layer 4 malicious traffic from reaching your game server
  • OSI layer 7 rate limiting

Where Game Guard cannot help

While Game Guard can help mitigate serious DDoS attacks, your game server may still be vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks.

Make sure you are doing the following:

Disconnect invalid players

The Rivet Matchmaker has systems in place to ensure players are valid & optionally completed a captcha befor issuing a player token. Ensure this player token is valid before letting a player connect to your game.

Disconnect sockets immediately if matchmaker.players.connected returns an error. Specifically:

Additionally, don't accept any packets from the client until matchmaker.players.connected has succeeded.

Limit packet size & frequency

Game Guard mitigates attacks of high-volume packet spamming, but you will likely want to implement your own packet rate limiting mechanism.

Still having issues?

No game on Rivet should be suffering from DDoS attacks if set up correctly.

If you're having issues with DDoS attacks on your game, contact us and we'll make sure your game is up and running.


SSL/TLS termination

You may need to use secure WebSockets or TCP+TLS when connecting to your game servers. For example, HTTPS websites require secure WebSockets or you may want to prevent Man in the Middle exploits by encrypting your game traffic.

Supporting this yourself requires you to regularly issue and update your own SSL and TLS certificates. Game Guard automatically manages SSL certificates for your game.

Was this page helpful?

Edit Page

Rivet

Open-source multiplayer infrastructure. Easy, flexible, and affordable.

This website is not sponsored by or affiliated with Unity Technologies or its affiliates. Unity Trademark(s) are trademark(s) or registered trademark(s) of Unity Technologies or its affiliates in the U.S. and elsewhere. | This website is not sponsored by, affiliated with, or endorsed by Epic Games, Inc. or its affiliates. 'Unreal Engine' is a trademark or registered trademark of Epic Games, Inc. in the U.S. and elsewhere. | The HTML5 Logo by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Source | The Godot Engine Logo by the Andrea Calabró, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Source | Docker and the Docker logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Docker, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Docker, Inc. and other parties may also have trademark rights in other terms used herein.

© 2024 Rivet Gaming, Inc. All rights reserved.