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Valve Corporation

About

Valve Corporation is an American video game developer, publisher and digital distribution company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. Valve is the developer of the software distribution platform Steam (released in 2003).

Valve was founded in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. Their debut product, the PC first-person shooter Half-Life, was released in 1998 with great acclaim and commercial success.
Status:
 Independent company
 10400 NE 4th St, Suite 1500, Bellevue, WA 98004 USA
 425-889-9642(0)
 support@valvesoftware.com
 

 Steam: Captive Portal


Based on the return values of the IPv6 checks, we come without a transition to the captive queries that Valve Corporation makes in the background.

October 2021, various callbacks to Google were detected during the operation of the Steam software via the steam.exe, which repeated at intervals of 5 minutes. According to the statement of friendly contacts, the behavior has been observed in the Steam client for a little longer

Steam Captive Queries
The feature forces the client to open a TCP connection to Google's servers. If the service is blocked (e.g. via host entries or Pi-Hole), an attempt is made to get outside with all force, so that in the test over 15000 queries from Steam to the Google servers were made within one day.
×

  Steam mit aktiVem Google CaptiVe

 Bildgröße: 92.96 kB | 2113x816px | Format: webp
Sha-256: 27A83C956963EAFAAB285D1ABD69E94062487741BBB57FD360270CBEEA0ACE3E

If you start looking for information, it quickly turns out that the queries belong to Google's Captive Portal and can also serve as a tracking tool.

Upon request to Valve, a support representative stated that no information will be provided in this regard.

Steam Support does not offer specific analysis of individual actions by the Steam Software. Any user-retrievable data can be obtained by your through Steam's Account Data page. Additional information can be found in the Privacy Policy Agreement. Valve Amos

Since this form of response was not satisfactory, it was written back again.
The conversation was closed directly by the support

As previously mentioned, we have no further information to provide, so this conversation will be closed. Valve Amos

In short: as always, requests are about (own) data at Valve... undesirable.

Code query:


 
IPv4 Beispiele:
172.217.168.67
172.217.18.99
142.250.186.35
142.250.185.227
172.217.168.67
216.58.212.131
216.58.215.227
142.250.185.195

Hostname
http://gstatic.com/generate_204

Endpunkt
gstaticadssl.l.google.com

GET /generate_204 HTTP/1.1
user-agent: Valve/Steam HTTP Client 1.0 (0)
Host: gstatic.com
Accept: text/html,*/*;q=0.9
accept-charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8,*;q=0.7
Accept-Encoding: identity

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2021 12:56:16 GMT
Content-Length: 0

Queries to Google's Captive Portal have been shut down since Steam version Fri Nov 19 2021 21:52:13. Nevertheless, about 3 months later, Valve Corporation began to integrate its own requests into its client, which are still existent today.

After Google, a Service of Its Own Followed


After a break of about 3 months, the Valve Corporation has stopped the callbacks to Google's Captive Portal, but it has created its own service, which is no less sociable.

This refers to "test.steampowered.com", which goes hand in hand with the IPv6 queries. The address is already blocked in the filter lists offered on gameindustry.eu. Users do not need to fear any loss of functionality.

Ipv4 & Hostnames

Steam_Captive_Portal.txt (1.96 KB)
Date: 2025-01-16
CRC32 Hash: 9eb113c9
SHA-256 Hash: 4bafb2aac4ea9a2a375001b60121ea81ddda4b9e35d2ac2d38e5071748faf6fc

Further Captive Portal Queries in Other Programs


In addition to Valve Corporation, others have also implemented these queries in their software.

Captive portal checks are used to determine if a device has unrestricted internet access. For example, Mozilla Firefox by Mozilla Corp. uses these mechanisms, as does Microsoft Corporation for their Windows operating system with their NCSI service. This can also be found in iOS, Android OS, and countless other platforms.

The mechanism might be familiar to many users in the context of Wi-Fi login in hotels and airports. Depending on the location, there are options to purchase additional packages to gain access to Wi-Fi networks. Captive portals force users to authenticate themselves if they want full network access, often linked with various conditions set by the respective operator.

Security Concerns


In addition to public Wi-Fi access, users need to carefully consider when to allow such services. Regular queries also mean:
  1. Device Identification: With each captive portal request, the MAC address and/or IP address of the device is transmitted, allowing for device identification.
  2. Location Tracking: When a device regularly connects to different networks, the operators of these networks can track the movement patterns of the device and user.
  3. Increased Privacy Risks: Movement profiles can reveal sensitive information about the daily activities and locations of users. This is highly undesirable for military or covert operations or other sensitive fields of work.
  4. Persistent Queries: Regular queries can lead to the unwanted collection and storage of user data. If these queries are not properly secured, they could be intercepted and misused by third parties.
  5. Network Load: Regular queries can add extra load to the network, especially in heavily used public Wi-Fi networks, and increase the attack vectors.

 Valve Corporation Index


 Back to Valve Corporation index

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