AntVenom – The Failures of the Minecraft Chat Reporting System…

There are so many reasons that i could describe as to why i am two months late to covering the subject but none of them are excuses so i’m sorry about that however what these two months have allowed for us all to absorb is how we feel about this update for those unaware

I’m referring to the introduction of the minecraft chat reporting system that was officially implemented into minecraft java edition on this past july 27th this update first hit mainstream attention back on june 21st when this feature was first implemented into pre-release one followed by fit’s rather well-timed video about this update’s implications

Which helped bring knowledge of this change to the masses long story short from this point forward if you send a message on a server that meet the requirements for any of the following offenses you can be reported for those messages if your messages are reported to mojang a moderator from mojing’s team of

Minecraft investigators will review the report alongside the evidence provided within and take action against you if your messages are found to be in violation of minecraft’s community guidelines if action is taken against you you will lose access to all minecraft multiplayer services for some amount of time whether that be

Temporarily or permanently community reactions to this update have been well [Applause] sufficient to say emotions were flaring quite aggressively when this update first dropped one side arguing that this update would protect the kids and the other side arguing that their safety was actively being compromised with this update given that minecraft has always

Thrived on being a game for all to enjoy no matter how niche their community i don’t support or advocate for any illegal behavior being tolerated but to mojang i say what happens to the niche communities that don’t do anything illegal but are otherwise only expressing their own free speech on the

Privacy of their own server with their own rules what happens to 2b2t a server that prides itself on having no rules of any kind will the players of that server have to watch their tongue now for fear of others looking to report anything and everything that they might say

Well now that a few months have gone by what time has granted us all are options to mitigate the system if we don’t support it both as players and server owners if a server were to enable the setting that would force all of their users to comply with the system which

Can be done and i’ll explain later the free market is most likely going to dictate that that server have far fewer players and you know what i’m all right with that any server that does require chat messages to be verified through mojang’s new chat reporting system are

Sending a clear message to those who connect that they wish for their users to be protected by mojang either that or it’s a minecraft realm server wherein the system is always enabled or it’s just a server using the default server settings in which case they should probably be protected too this is

In case you didn’t know and you needed to be reminded twice that chat messages can’t be verified you know why i don’t support this chat reporting system well the reasons are plentiful but setting the stage is just as important you can’t form a solid opinion without understanding the facts of the situation

This video is going to go pretty in-depth as to how the system works and how it does not so you can form a solid opinion of your own at the end of the day because ladies and gentlemen we are not going back to a world without the chat reporting system

Do you like the idea of giving your exact street address to every single server and website you visit if you answered yes you’re dumb fix that by investing in today’s sponsor nordvpn if you don’t want your isp to know every single website you visit check out nordvpn if you don’t want a minecraft

Server owner to know your real ip address nordvpn do you want to access a piece of content that’s blocked from being viewed in your country well try out nordvpn hit a few buttons and bam now you can access it nord also offers nordpass which allows for you to generate super secure passwords store

Them in the cloud which means you won’t have to remember your passwords anymore because you can access them on any device and there’s also nord locker which allows for you to protect your files online within an encrypted cloud server check out nordvpn by heading on over to nordvpn.comantvenom

And see if any of their plans will work for you again that’s nordvpn.com ant venom in order to properly set the stage i need to explain to you how the system works so that i can then explain to you how it does not whenever you send a

Message in chat from this point forward on servers running 1.19.1 or higher and that’s key the server will receive more information from you than just the chat message itself instead of your messages looking something like this now they look like this all you really need to know here is that

Every message that you send from this point forward contains your profile id a timestamp for that message the message itself and something that’s called a signature this signature is what mojang uses to verify that the message that you sent was not forged or faked in any way to

Make a very long story short this message signature is generated using something that’s called a public key that anyone can obtain for your account and also a private key which only mojang and the account holder should ever know these details alongside some other pieces of information that i’ll get into

Later generates each message’s signature assuming the server doesn’t make any attempt to modify your message once you’ve sent it every player online at the time of you sending your message will receive this entire message packet and only those who are online at the time of you sending that message can

Report you for it the first curiosity that i want to address is what sort of control players and server owners have for enabling or disabling this feature if it were possible for players to easily opt out of the system it would be safe to assume that people would not be so upset about

It so let’s break it down first for the server owners out there if you are running an unmodified server that is specifically on version 1.19.1 or higher there now exists an option within your server properties file called enforce secure profile which by default is set to true while set to true this

Option means that any player that tries to log onto your server without revealing their public key will not be allowed on at all this is the same public key that i mentioned before that goes into generating your message signatures without this public key any messages that you would send in-game would

Effectively become unreportable as there would be no valid signature attached to any of your messages anymore we’ll get into that later on if you want your server to be protected under this new chat reporting system then keep this option set to true if you do not want

Your server to be protected under this new system and you want your users to have the option to make their own messages unreportable then set this option to false now let’s say that you’re a user connecting to a server that has this option disabled are your messages automatically unreportable well

No for that you’ll have to dive into mods and thankfully there are some really good options now this is the part of the video where i begin to explain to you just how badly the system can be broken and there’s a lot to get into

So no chat reports is a forge and fabric mod created by azastral that’s been downloaded over 800 000 times that does one of two very simple things first off you know those message signatures that i spent so long explaining to you well in a nutshell this mod strips out the

Signature from every single message that you send in game if you try to connect to servers that enforce secure profiles while using this mod the mod will tell you that it needs to be disabled in order to join that server and the mod does provide that option but for every

Other server this mod also prevents all of your messages from being reportable if mojang were to punish you for messages that they could not verify as genuine what would even be the point of this system if you’re a server owner though and you enable this mod as a

Plug-in on your server every single chat message sent on your server by all players will have their signatures removed as the server receives those messages and it does this by converting everybody’s messages to server announcement style messages which are not reportable massive shout out to the no encryption

Spigot plugin along with every other endeavor out there to give users the options that mojang did not if a server owner doesn’t want any of their players to be able to be reported to mojang this is what they’ll have to enable to guarantee that fact now if you think

That’s the end of breaking the chat reporting system you would be sorely mistaken that’s actually where it begins strap yourselves in because there’s a lot to get through and it gets pretty technical in order for me to even consider supporting the system as a whole it would have to be bulletproof

Against wider communities attempts to break it and break it they certainly have mojang claims that these exploits do not work but the community have said otherwise now everything that i’ve said and will say from this point on is purely for educational and informational purposes and i do not encourage or

Endorse the use of these exploits and you can be banned for using them so be warned the three exploits that i’m going to talk about today are named gaslight 3 girl boss and guardian first up gaslight when the chat reporting system was initially implemented the way in which

Chat messages were signed was that each individual message was sent to the server with a signature attached to it gaslight 3’s first predecessor gaslight 1 exploited this fact by allowing for you to entirely remove messages from your report thereby allowing for you to change the context of whatever was being

Reported in the first place and it allowed for you to inject fake messages from yourself because through some code wizardry magic you were able to generate valid signatures for your own messages even if you never typed them in the server in the first place if players could be reported for things that they

Never responded to that would obviously be horrifyingly bad mojang responded to this exploit by implementing blockchain technology into every message’s signature it’s funny that they did this right around the same time that they would ban nfts from minecraft which we’ll be covering on this channel very

Soon so be sure you’re subscribed if you don’t want to miss that now basically in a nutshell after mojang patched the previous exploit new chat message signatures would now take the previous chat message that was sent on the server into consideration when generating the next message signature

This means that you would need to receive a packet for every single message sent on the server at least from the moment that you first logged on and that includes receiving a packet for every single private message that anybody sends on the server even if you were not the recipient of that private

Message when you receive a message packet for a private message that was not sent to you directly you’ll still get that message’s signature but the message field will be blank both gaslight 3 and girlboss exploit this exact problem the gaslight 3 exploit takes advantage of this by allowing for

You to convert any public message packet into what will look like in the report like a private message that was sent to somebody else thereby allowing for you to change the context of a report once again you might think that you could be banned for asking an offensive question

And you can be but for that exact problem there exists another exploit called guardian guardian is harder to explain so i’ll let azastral the developer of the no chat reports mod explain it what you can do is pretend that you never see any messages from other players ever in this example mark

Is doing exactly that despite participating in the conversation he sends a message with empty last scene signatures list even though normally it would contain was seen signatures from bob and alice and what happens now is that there is no way to connect his messages to the rest of the conversation

Or even be sure he participated in this conversation and not some different one by the way this video goes on for over 48 minutes and as astral has been instrumental in the community’s effort to understand the system so you should definitely check out the other videos he’s made on the matter

On top of that the girl boss exploit also takes advantage of this message packet problem by informing you of when private messages are sent between players because again you do get a message packet for all messages now including private ones the girl boss exploit can also figure out who is

Sending a private message to who even if it doesn’t spill the beans on what that message packet contains i guess private messages aren’t all that private anymore All right time for my opinion question one do i support this system in theory yes in practice no if this system were bulletproof against bad actors trying to break it and if i trusted the minecraft investigators to do their job correctly then yes i could support this system

Regardless of how any of us feel about this you could argue that no matter what increasing political pressure from various countries for companies to moderate the content of their platforms would have pushed mojang down this path eventually especially since most games already have a chat reporting feature of

Some sort but as i’ve already explained this system is not bulletproof if bad actors are in any way shape or form able to abuse the system in order to get innocent players in trouble then i can’t support it because it’s fundamentally broken then there’s the trust issue

Why don’t i trust mojang to get this right well it’s because of mojang’s parent company microsoft i’m not gonna sit here and decry that everything microsoft have done for minecraft has been bad that’s quite simply not the case mojang could have sold out to ea games back in 2014 and who knows where

We’d be if something like that had happened if another less resourceful company were the ones to take the reins of minecraft we might not even be getting any updates of any kind anymore i would also argue that the art department from minecraft advertising have absolutely killed it ever since they took over

While microsoft definitely have the resources to make minecraft great they often misstep in ways that are just downright confusing let’s take minecraft console edition for example 4j studios developed a beloved version of minecraft only for microsoft to shut them down in favor of mojing developing minecraft bedrock edition cross-platform play

Reliably good performance what’s not to like here bedrock edition’s performance gains were among one of its shining qualities until recently when mojing swapped to using the render dragon engine to provide the game with ray tracing support after that bedrock edition’s performance without even using any kind of shader plummeted microsoft

Are also the same company that introduced the edge internet browser and forced it as the default option for every single windows 10 user with a windows update this is the microsoft pattern shove a product in everybody’s faces force them to use it if they have any means of forcing you and provide

Half-baked support for it back in july of 2014 microsoft fired their entire windows testing division and barnacles made an entire video about it when it happened as he was on that team at microsoft i don’t trust microsoft and mojing to get the chat reporting system right because of their history with

Mismanagement in the past setting all of that aside however a good spin-off question that i would like to address can be summarized like this okay so what you’re not gonna get banned big deal why are you complaining if this won’t affect you and to that i referenced this chat system’s

Implementation within minecraft bedrock edition which has not been perfect the mrepik made a great video all about this problem in bedrock edition and long story short players have been banned for reasons that they are not even aware of there are plenty of help articles that mojing have provided us to better

Understand the system but aside from that it feels like they’re choosing to play the radio silent card on nearly all fronts when they’re not radio silent they say stuff like this yeah okay why can mojang not provide specific evidence before banning a player runescape had evidence logs figured out

20 years ago it’s not that hard some parts of microsoft seem to be getting better and the design language of windows 11 is in my opinion a reason for us to have some hope but if players can get banned for very little in bedrock edition what’s to say that won’t happen

In java edition as well at some point at what point do i blow the whistle again well instead of worrying about covering such divisive topics that put players at each other’s throats all i’m going to do is recommend those who do not like this system to install the no chat reports

Mod and move on we are not going back and it’s up to mojang as to whether or not they’ll actually improve the system to the point where we can all be happy about it as far as i’m concerned i’m going back to making fun videos about fun subjects and experimenting with

Minecraft in fun ways i hope you’re game for that so yeah check out my youtubes thanks to nordvpn for sponsoring this video my name is ant venom and thanks for watching you