Force Plugin for All Rooms

JPGOrdon

My goal is to circumvent Photon-authentication by having my custom plugin authenticate players independently. Because I need the game server to authenticate all connected players, it seems like a breach of security to require players to specify my specific plugin for authentication to work. In other words: is there a way I can guarantee that my plugins instance will be created, even when the player does not specify my plugin for their room?

JPGOrdon

I have a part-answer. According to the docs, the plugin factory decides what plugin to load. The docs also state that the class is expected to be built with the plugins assembly.

If each plugin is expected to have a plugin factory, in a multiple-plugin setup, which factory determines the creation of the plugin? Even if the factory forwards the construction of each plugin to its designated plugin factory, I don't understand which factory would be used.

I believe I am not understanding something correctly.

JohnTube

Hi @JPGOrdon,

I have moved this discussion to the Photon Server category as it's more appropriate.

User authentication happens on a different server: it happens on the Name Server (and could also happen on the Master Server).
On the Game Server, "where plugins live", connected users are already authenticated and use the authentication token generated by the authentication server (Name Server or Master Server).

So not sure what is wrong with Photon authentication to make you want to circumvent it?
And why do you need to add extra authentication on the Game Server level?
And I don't see the "breach of security" you refer to?
Do you mean that client can specify the authentication provider they want to use?
Well after all they can use only those you configure server side.
And you can disable "anonymous authentication".
And for each provider you need some credentials.

Now regarding plugins:

Per application you can have a single plugin assembly configured at a time.
So when you change configuration and the updates are propagated and applied all new clients will use the newly configured plugin. The old configured plugin assembly will be unloaded once all rooms using it will be disposed of.

The plugin factory is called once per plugin assembly, when the latter is loaded.
Inside the plugin factory you decide which plugin(s) (or plugin class(es)) are allowed, either one or more.
So you have total control: you can always force the plugin no matter what the client requests in create room operation or check what the client sends and if it's unexpected you can detect that.

So I understand that the confusion could be happening from naming or from "plugins assembly" vs." plugin class"...So you have one DLL (assembly) and one factory but multiple plugin classes (you can still have a single plugin inside assembly).

JPGOrdon

@JohnTube Thank you for explaining that only a single plugin assembly is loaded at a time, I was expecting a different approach.

I was having issues with the client-side authentication response and I decided to forego it entirely for a Plugin that does the same thing when a player joins. When I was testing custom authentication, the client would only be authenticated once connected to the game server. Perhaps I wrongly setup the authentication provider settings, and got this abnormal behavior where the game server authenticates?