What is Tavern Worker?

[Adam]

Tavern Worker got installed with the game , is it like an Anti Cheat?

[Little Strawberry]

Tavern / TavernWorker is spyware, that's why it wants to have your administrator rights. Dual boot or use a VM to keep yourself safe.

[Crypto Highwind]

Little Strawberry の投稿を引用：

Tavern / TavernWorker is spyware, that's why it wants to have your administrator rights. Dual boot or use a VM to keep yourself safe.

Proof or BS

[Jack The Dripper]

Little Strawberry の投稿を引用：

Tavern / TavernWorker is spyware, that's why it wants to have your administrator rights. Dual boot or use a VM to keep yourself safe.

*your aware the majority of things majority of people have on PC & Phones are Spyware right?*

[Deathfromace]

Little Strawberry の投稿を引用：

Tavern / TavernWorker is spyware, that's why it wants to have your administrator rights. Dual boot or use a VM to keep yourself safe.

With that logic everything is spyware on default windows settings.

[MechaMS]

Little Strawberry の投稿を引用：

Tavern / TavernWorker is spyware, that's why it wants to have your administrator rights. Dual boot or use a VM to keep yourself safe.

You're not gonna farm clown awards as you maybe think you would

[SeaHacking]

Not sure why everyone is disagreeing here. It scans giant chunks of your hard drive while its running, thats not what an anticheat does.

[[Censored]]

SeaHacking の投稿を引用：

Not sure why everyone is disagreeing here. It scans giant chunks of your hard drive while its running, thats not what an anticheat does.

its a bitcoin miner i think

[CyanCatMan]

SeaHacking の投稿を引用：

Not sure why everyone is disagreeing here. It scans giant chunks of your hard drive while its running, thats not what an anticheat does.

The fact that no one knows what it even is in the first place is concerning too.
Not like its the game itself, you can apparently kill it in task and play normally until you escape and it crashes. Still keep the loot thhough.

[SeaHacking]

Censored の投稿を引用：

SeaHacking の投稿を引用：

Not sure why everyone is disagreeing here. It scans giant chunks of your hard drive while its running, thats not what an anticheat does.

its a bitcoin miner i think

It's reading disk, not hogging gpu.

CyanCatMan の投稿を引用：

SeaHacking の投稿を引用：

Not sure why everyone is disagreeing here. It scans giant chunks of your hard drive while its running, thats not what an anticheat does.

The fact that no one knows what it even is in the first place is concerning too.
Not like its the game itself, you can apparently kill it in task and play normally until you escape and it crashes. Still keep the loot thhough.

I mean, it's reading large chunks of random files. It's either spyware, or the worst anticheat implementation ever. My guess is the latter, while also accidently the first. Really irresponsible approach to data privacy. Also not consistent with their privacy policy and anti-cheat policy, which might make them vulnerable to a class action or something, but I'm no lawyer.

[ShaZe]

Yeah I just noticed that too, I was wondering why my disks were constantly spinning while playing this game and the last time I had tried checking, I couldn't launch the game anymore since they don't like when we run diagnostics tool.
I finally did it while in-game already and noticed it was scanning literally everything... what the ♥♥♥♥

[Louis Harriger]

People are talking about it in this post here too: https://steamcommunity.com/app/2016590/discussions/0/4340987242601838457/

This started to happen to me. One of the developers even complained to Kaspersky that their antivirus detected this process as exhibiting suspicious activity. https://forum.kaspersky.com/topic/false-positive-45165/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240622075321/https://forum.kaspersky.com/topic/false-positive-45165/

Posted May 9

Hello. I’m Youngkwang Oh from IRONMACE.

We are serving a game called 'Dark and Darker' (https://darkanddarker.com).
Recently, your AntiVirus is misdiagnosing our own anti-cheat programs (Tavern.exe, TavernWorker.exe).
The diagnostic code is 'PDM:Trojan.Win32.General' and it is misdiagnosed by your System Watcher.
For your information, our anti-cheat is packed with VMProtect for security.
Many of our players are suffering from inconvenience because of this.
We submitted detected images.
Please review it as soon as soon as possible.

Best regards.

I did more searching and here's another place discussing this: https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkAndDarker/comments/1djgee5/tavernworkerexe/

I noticed whenever i played dark and darker, my old hdd would spin up randomly. Loud enough that i can hear it through headphones. The game is on an ssd obviously and has nothing to do with that drive.

With resource monitoring software i found out that Tavernworker.exe sometimes decides to read random sectors of just about any drive you have connected. And not just small bits of it but full read speed over the course of several minutes.

I get that anticheat is important but this is absolutey not the way. There's not even a single program or executable on that whole drive. This is not only annoying it also reduces lifetime of your hardware. Do better Ironmace.

[ShaZe]

Im creating a new account and disabling permissions to all my secondary drives.

But that game is getting closer to receiving the same treatment I applied to League of Legend

Edit: Talked too soon, it really runs as system. Alright, I guess ill just stop playing, dont have time to waste to hide and re-enable drives just to make sure a poorly made anticheat system doesn't screw up my drives.

[Louis Harriger]

ShaZe の投稿を引用：

Im creating a new account and disabling permissions to all my secondary drives.

But that game is getting closer to receiving the same treatment I applied to League of Legend

Edit: Talked too soon, it really runs as system. Alright, I guess ill just stop playing, dont have time to waste to hide and re-enable drives just to make sure a poorly made anticheat system doesn't screw up my drives.

It's wild, because I used to encrypt all of my private data all across my drives (separately from full-disk encryption), because I was worried about things like this. But, I got lazy and stopped.

So, now I'm considering organizing my files again (tax records, email, private conversations, etc.) so that if they aren't being responsible with whatever data they are collecting from us that my information is safe.

What if Ironmace is hacked and they've scanned our tax records, social security records, private business correspondence, etc.? What exactly are they sending back to their servers as they scan our private personal emails, confidential business records, etc.? A game development company should be going out of their way to NOT be touching these data.

Personally, I think they need should write a FAQ that answers exactly what this is doing and write it as if it is for a tech-literate cybersecurity aware audience. We're LONG past the era where the general public was tech illiterate. Most of us get tech now, so we understand why this is bad.

[Louis Harriger]

I figured out a temporary solution to AT LEAST to protect the confidentiality of your data. If you use Windows, you can use disk encryption or (if using pro edition) Bitlocker. Combine this with account-level file encryption.

Without going into step-by-step details, you need to:

1) Create a separate local standard user (non-admin) account to run DaD on.
2) Enable full disk encryption for your secondary or tertiary drives (quaternary?).
3) Enable folder-level encryption tied to your normal account (using the properties menu under advanced "encrypt contents to secure data" — be sure to backup the encryption keys in multiple places for recovery).

Then every time you want to play DaD you would log into your DaD user on your computer. When you are done and you want to access your files again, then you need to reboot your computer. (Always reboot your computer without logging into your primary account prior to playing DaD to ensure that your files are encrypted and inaccessible to this mysterious process).

This is the only solution I could come up with to at LEAST protect the confidentiality of your private files, since we do not know what the DaD devs have created this process to do. Is it enumerating all files and transmitting this list of these files back to the dev's servers? Is it just checking files for known fingerprint of software used to cheat? What is it doing? In any case it shouldn't be constantly scanning our drives.

Until we know what it does, players should take the time to protect the confidentiality of their data by protecting it.

Note: the process may still read the drive causing wear and tear. This does not solve that problem.

References:
- https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/how-to-encrypt-a-file-1131805c-47b8-2e3e-a705-807e13c10da7
- https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/turn-on-device-encryption-0c453637-bc88-5f74-5105-741561aae838

[Crunchy[Daz]]

I love how everyone is all worried about security but apprently puts all their banking info, social security, tax information, blood type, and everything else they don't want stolen, on thier hard drive.

Hate to break it to you, but there's nothing they could take from you thats going to effect you or your life at all. I'm sorry but you don't have super secret files that everyone wants to get into. You have basically nothing of worth to anyone.

Your name and phone number is more valuable then anything on your PC and they already have it.