Network Traffic

Preamble When I first started looking at the Simcity 2013 traffic, I had hoped I could peak at all of the server communication they do. Sadly (for me), the team at Maxis was fairly smart when it came to securing their encrypted traffic and they were able to thwart my initial attempts to man-in-the-middle (MITM) the connection between the Simcity client and their servers. I plan on attempt that some more in the future, but for now I’m going to look at the traffic from a higher level....

Like many other who have tried playing Simcity since it’s launch, I’ve had time wasted fighting with their servers trying to get online. This motivated me to start looking at the game’s network traffic to see what I could find. When you initially start up the game, the launcher connects to a number of different servers; this includes the advertisement area (the newsletter in the above screenshot) and recent news. If you click the “SELECT SERVER” button, it does a GET on this URL:...