Steam is automatically adding 2 inbound rules in the Windows Firewall for every game installed

[Digitoxin]

I purchased a new hard drive and decided to download and install my entire game collection. I noticed that Steam decided to open up all TCP and UDP ports inbound in the Windows Firewall for every game I installed.

Why is Steam doing this? Is there a way to disable this feature?

[Black Blade]

I assume its part of there easy "plug and play" type of system that Steam is, easy to download, no need to mess with installers for the most part, and its setup the firewall rules and everything it self
I do not think there is a way to turn it off at these time

[Digitoxin]

I had to remove them all manually. It put several thousand inbound rules in Windows Firewall.

[Darkstar]

Thank you for posting this. I've been struggling for the past few months since installing my whole library with the windows firewall service (via svchost.exe) using up 6-10% of my cpu while steam is running. Restarting the firewall service eliminates the usage... for a while. But it eventually comes back. Hopefully removing the many exceptions that steam has added will sort things out.

Also, for anyone else with this issue, note that if you move a game from one drive to another, you will end up with inbound exceptions for both the new drive and the old. It also adds 2 exceptions for each .exe file in a game's folder. So for instance, Cossacks 3 will have 8 exceptions. And it does it for non-steam game shortcuts too.

EDIT: Just deleted 30k+ exceptions. Let's see if the cpu usage drops consistently...

[krab Vartex]

OKE

[Darkstar]

For anyone in the future dealing with this issue:

Deleting all the firewall exceptions seems to have sorted out the constant cpu drain!

[Muppet among Puppets]

Which windows are you using? Or where do you see that amount of entries?

[Darkstar]

Windows 7 x64.

The entries were in the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security tool under Inbound Rules.

[Muppet among Puppets]

If you want a firewall that only allows inbound traffic that was initiated from inside, maybe windows firewall is not it.
Without a router firewall i would recommend something else.

[Darkstar]

I've got a router firewall. The issue was that Steam automatically added a ton of exceptions to the built-in windows firewall and that in turn caused some constant CPU usage. Ideally Steam shouldn't be doing that, but it is.

[76561198312531890]

I found the answer. The two programs that normally show up in your list when setting your firewall rules are (for my computer, at least) are "Steam Client WebHelper" and "Steam Client Bootstrapper." You have to find "streaming_client.exe" in your steam folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\streaming_client.exe on my machine) and add a firewall rule blocking that one from access to the internet, as well. A helpful lady from McAfee figured that out for me three days ago, and so far, so good. I haven't had any new rules pop up.

[TorMazila]

Originally posted by Darkstar:

For anyone in the future dealing with this issue:

Deleting all the firewall exceptions seems to have sorted out the constant cpu drain!

1. 30K rules is very cpu-intensive task when nothing is matching
2. In FreeBSD typically you have something like

allow tcp from any to me established

somewhere close to the start of your firewall rules list - that saves a day by not checking connections that were successfully established. In Linux you can do the same (just a bit different way) and it probably should be doable in Windows... somehow :) - if you can specify tcp flags. So only the packets sent during connection establishment will pass through your zillion rules.

Originally posted by Darkstar:

I've got a router firewall. The issue was that Steam automatically added a ton of exceptions to the built-in windows firewall and that in turn caused some constant CPU usage. Ideally Steam shouldn't be doing that, but it is.

Un'F'fortunately, the router firewall has no clue about the applications on your client PC, so e.g. both some unknown trojan and your web-browser will be able to connect to some port 80 or 443 w/o problems. While a firewall on your client PC can figure out who's doing what and can prevent something from happening, unless the malicious app will be able to control that firewall (turn off/add rules/or substitute driver completely)