Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in the Steam Client

Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in the Steam Client

Frag Grenade! A Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in the Steam Client

Frag Grenade! A Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in the Steam Client

This blog post explains the story behind a bug which had existed in the Steam client for at least the last ten years, and until last July would have resulted in remote code execution (RCE) in all 15 million active clients.

The keen-eyed, security conscious PC gamers amongst you may have noticed that Valve released a new update to the Steam client in recent weeks.
This blog post aims to justify why we play games in the office explain the story behind the corresponding bug, which had existed in the Steam client for at least the last ten years, and until last July would have resulted in remote code execution (RCE) in all 15 million active clients.
Since July, when Valve (finally) compiled their code with modern exploit protections enabled, it would have simply caused a client crash, with RCE only possible in combination with a separate info-leak vulnerability.
Our vulnerability was reported to Valve on the 20th February 2018 and to their credit, was fixed in the beta branch less than 12 hours later. The fix was pushed to the stable branch on the 22nd March 2018.


At its core, the vulnerability was a heap corruption within the Steam client library that could be remotely triggered, in an area of code that dealt with fragmented datagram reassembly from multiple received UDP packets.

The Steam client communicates using a custom protocol – the “Steam protocol” – which is delivered on top of UDP. There are two fields of particular interest in this protocol which are relevant to the vulnerability:

  • Packet length
  • Total reassembled datagram length

The bug was caused by the absence of a simple check to ensure that, for the first packet of a fragmented datagram, the specified packet length was less than or equal to the total datagram length. This seems like a simple oversight, given that the check was present for all subsequent packets carrying fragments of the datagram.

Without additional info-leaking bugs, heap corruptions on modern operating systems are notoriously difficult to control to the point of granting remote code execution. In this case, however, thanks to Steam’s custom memory allocator and (until last July) no ASLR on the steamclient.dll binary, this bug could have been used as the basis for a highly reliable exploit.

What follows is a technical write-up of the vulnerability and its subsequent exploitation, to the point where code execution is achieved.

Vulnerability Details



The Steam protocol has been reverse engineered and well documented by others (e.g. from analysis of traffic generated by the Steam client. The protocol was initially documented in 2008 and has not changed significantly since then.

The protocol is implemented as a connection-orientated protocol over the top of a UDP datagram stream. The packet structure, as documented in the existing research linked above, is as follows:

Key points:

  • All packets start with the 4 bytes “VS01
  • packet_len describes the length of payload (for unfragmented datagrams, this is equal to data length)
  • type describes the type of packet, which can take the following values:
    • 0x2 Authenticating Challenge
    • 0x4 Connection Accept
    • 0x5 Connection Reset
    • 0x6 Packet is a datagram fragment
    • 0x7 Packet is a standalone datagram
  • The source and destination fields are IDs assigned to correctly route packets from multiple connections within the steam client
  • In the case of the packet being a datagram fragment:
    • split_count refers to the number of fragments that the datagram has been split up into
    • data_len refers to the total length of the reassembled datagram
  • The initial handling of these UDP packets occurs in the CUDPConnection::UDPRecvPkt function within steamclient.dll


The payload of the datagram packet is AES-256 encrypted, using a key negotiated between the client and server on a per-session basis. Key negotiation proceeds as follows:

  • Client generates a 32-byte random AES key and RSA encrypts it with Valve’s public key before sending to the server.
  • The server, in possession of the private key, can decrypt this value and accepts it as the AES-256 key to be used for the session
  • Once the key is negotiated, all payloads sent as part of this session are encrypted using this key.


The vulnerability exists within the RecvFragment method of the CUDPConnection class. No symbols are present in the release version of the steamclient library, however a search through the strings present in the binary will reveal a reference to “CUDPConnection::RecvFragment” in the function of interest. This function is entered when the client receives a UDP packet containing a Steam datagram of type 0x6 (Datagram fragment).

1. The function starts by checking the connection state to ensure that it is in the “Connected” state.
2. The data_len field within the Steam datagram is then inspected to ensure it contains fewer than a seemingly arbitrary 0x20000060 bytes.
3. If this check is passed, it then checks to see if the connection is already collecting fragments for a particular datagram or whether this is the first packet in the stream.

Figure 1

4. If this is the first packet in the stream, the split_count field is then inspected to see how many packets this stream is expected to span
5. If the stream is split over more than one packet, the seq_no_of_first_pkt field is inspected to ensure that it matches the sequence number of the current packet, ensuring that this is indeed the first packet in the stream.
6. The data_len field is again checked against the arbitrary limit of 0x20000060 and also the split_count is validated to be less than 0x709bpackets.

Figure 2

7. If these assertions are true, a Boolean is set to indicate we are now collecting fragments and a check is made to ensure we do not already have a buffer allocated to store the fragments.

Figure 3

8. If the pointer to the fragment collection buffer is non-zero, the current fragment collection buffer is freed and a new buffer is allocated (see yellow box in Figure 4 below). This is where the bug manifests itself. As expected, a fragment collection buffer is allocated with a size of data_lenbytes. Assuming this succeeds (and the code makes no effort to check – minor bug), then the datagram payload is then copied into this buffer using memmove, trusting the field packet_len to be the number of bytes to copy. The key oversight by the developer is that no check is made that packet_len is less than or equal to data_len. This means that it is possible to supply a data_len smaller than packet_len and have up to 64kb of data (due to the 2-byte width of the packet_len field) copied to a very small buffer, resulting in an exploitable heap corruption.

Figure 4


This section assumes an ASLR work-around is present, leading to the base address of steamclient.dll being known ahead of exploitation.


In order for an attacker’s UDP packets to be accepted by the client, they must observe an outbound (client->server) datagram being sent in order to learn the client/server IDs of the connection along with the sequence number. The attacker must then spoof the UDP packet source/destination IPs and ports, along with the client/server IDs and increment the observed sequence number by one.


For allocations larger than 1024 (0x400) bytes, the default system allocator is used. For allocations smaller or equal to 1024 bytes, Steam implements a custom allocator that works in the same way across all supported platforms. In-depth discussion of this custom allocator is beyond the scope of this blog, except for the following key points:

  1. Large blocks of memory are requested from the system allocator that are then divided into fixed-size chunks used to service memory allocation requests from the steam client.
  2. Allocations are sequential with no metadata separating the in-use chunks.
  3. Each large block maintains its own freelist, implemented as a singly linked list.
  4. The head of the freelist points to the first free chunk in a block, and the first 4-bytes of that chunk points to the next free chunk if one exists.


When a block is allocated, the first free block is unlinked from the head of the freelist, and the first 4-bytes of this block corresponding to the next_free_block are copied into the freelist_head member variable within the allocator class.


When a block is freed, the freelist_head field is copied into the first 4 bytes of the block being freed (next_free_block), and the address of the block being freed is copied into the freelist_head member variable within the allocator class.


The buffer overflow occurs in the heap, and depending on the size of the packets used to cause the corruption, the allocation could be controlled by either the default Windows allocator (for allocations larger than 0x400 bytes) or the custom Steam allocator (for allocations smaller than 0x400 bytes). Given the lack of security features of the custom Steam allocator, I chose this as the simpler of the two to exploit.


The heap corruption allows us to overwrite the next_free_block pointer if there is a free block adjacent to the block that the overflow occurs in. Assuming that the heap can be groomed to ensure this is the case, the overwritten next_free_block pointer can be set to an address to write to, and then a future allocation will be written to this location.


The memory corruption bug occurs in the code responsible for processing datagram fragments (Type 6 packets). Once the corruption has occurred, the RecvFragment() function is in a state where it is expecting more fragments to arrive. However, if they do arrive, a check is made to ensure:

fragment_size + num_bytes_already_received < sizeof(collection_buffer)

This will obviously not be the case, as our first packet has already violated that assertion (the bug depends on the omission of this check) and an error condition will be raised. To avoid this, the CUDPConnection::RecvFragment() method must be avoided after memory corruption has occurred.

Thankfully, CUDPConnection::RecvDatagram() is still able to receive and process type 7 (Datagram) packets sent whilst RecvFragment() is out of action and can be used to trigger the write primitive.


Packets being received by both RecvDatagram() and RecvFragment() are expected to be encrypted. In the case of RecvDatagram(), the decryption happens almost immediately after the packet has been received. In the case of RecvFragment(), it happens after the last fragment of the session has been received.

This presents a problem for exploitation as we do not know the encryption key, which is derived on a per-session basis. This means that any ROP code/shellcode that we send down will be ‘decrypted’ using AES256, turning our data into junk. It is therefore necessary to find a route to exploitation that occurs very soon after packet reception, before the decryption routines have a chance to run over the payload contained in the packet buffer.


Given the encryption limitation stated above, exploitation must be achieved before any decryption is performed on the incoming data. This adds additional constraints, but is still achievable by overwriting a pointer to a CWorkThreadPool object stored in a predictable location within the data section of the binary. While the details and inner workings of this class are unclear, the name suggests it maintains a pool of threads that can be used when ‘work’ needs to be done. Inspecting some debug strings within the binary, encryption and decryption appear to be two of these work items (E.g. CWorkItemNetFilterEncryptCWorkItemNetFilterDecrypt), and so the CWorkThreadPool class would get involved when those jobs are queued. Overwriting this pointer with a location of our choice allows us to fake a vtable pointer and associated vtable, allowing us to gain execution when, for example, CWorkThreadPool::AddWorkItem() is called, which is necessarily prior to any decryption occurring.

Figure 5 shows a successful exploitation up to the point that EIP is controlled.

Figure 5

From here, a ROP chain can be created that leads to execution of arbitrary code. The video below demonstrates an attacker remotely launching the Windows calculator app on a fully patched version of Windows 10.


If you’ve made it to this section of the blog, thank you for sticking with it! I hope it is clear that this was a very simple bug, made relatively straightforward to exploit due to a lack of modern exploit protections. The vulnerable code was probably very old, but as it was otherwise in good working order, the developers likely saw no reason to go near it or update their build scripts. The lesson here is that as a developer it is important to periodically include aging code and build systems in your reviews to ensure they conform to modern security standards, even if the actual functionality of the code has remained unchanged. The fact that such a simple bug with such serious consequences has existed in such a popular software platform for so many years may be surprising to find in 2018 and should serve as encouragement to all vulnerability researchers to find and report more of them!

As a final note, it is worth commenting on the responsible disclosure process. This bug was disclosed to Valve in an email to their security team ( at around 4pm GMT and just 8 hours later a fix had been produced and pushed to the beta branch of the Steam client. As a result, Valve now hold the top spot in the (imaginary) Context fastest-to-fix leaderboard, a welcome change from the often lengthy back-and-forth process often encountered when disclosing to other vendors.

A page detailing all updates to the Steam client can be found at


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