Game Infrastructure Audits: The Blind Spot Between Security and Performance
Launch builds pass penetration testing. Load tests hit target CCU. Nothing looks alarming in staging.Then real players connect from five regions, latency spikes appear, cheats surface through unexpected paths, and stability issues show up that no test flagged.
When that happens, the problem usually isn’t your game servers. It’s the network layer connecting everything together.
For online game studios, network infrastructure audits are the least discussed and most misunderstood part of pre‑launch readiness. They sit between security and performance, and because they don’t belong cleanly to either discipline, they’re often skipped entirely.
What a Network Infrastructure Audit Actually Means for Games
A network audit for a game studio is not an enterprise checklist exercise. It’s not about ticking boxes for firewalls, VPCs, or compliance frameworks.It answers one question only:
How does traffic really move through your backend when players and attackers behave unpredictably?
For modern online games, that means auditing:
- Matchmaking to relay to authoritative server paths
- UDP and TCP exposure assumptions
- NAT traversal, edge routing, and regional failover
- Cloud security group sprawl across environments
- Legacy rules left behind from previous milestones
- Third‑party services sitting on the critical path
Most studios believe these paths are “known” because they exist on diagrams. In practice, diagrams age faster than infrastructure. What’s deployed rarely matches what’s documented.
Why Traditional Testing Misses Network-Level Issues
Penetration testing focuses on what can be exploited.Load testing focuses on what breaks under scale.
Neither fully answers how those failures happen at the network layer.
Common blind spots we see during audits:
- Exploit paths that never touch application code Overlooked UDP exposure, permissive routing rules, or internal services reachable externally.
- Anti-cheat assumptions that collapse under real traffic Controls enforced at the application layer, bypassed through network behavior.
- DDoS amplification vectors Rate limiting exists in code, but not where packets actually hit the system.
- Latency introduced by late-stage security fixes Firewalls and filters added after load testing, shifting bottlenecks into production.
- Shadow infrastructure Old relay nodes, deprecated endpoints, or test environments still reachable.
None of these are unusual. They’re a byproduct of live development, multiple vendors, and aggressive timelines.
The issue isn’t that studios overlook these risks.
It’s that there’s no single test designed to surface them unless you audit the network explicitly.
How Cyrex Approaches Network Infrastructure Audits
Cyrex audits networks the same way attackers and players experience them: end to end, under real conditions, with multiple perspectives.Two things make the difference.
Pair Hacking at the Network Layer
Every Cyrex security engagement uses pair hacking. That applies just as strongly to network audits.Two security engineers working together identify exploit chains faster and more accurately than a single auditor. One engineer follows the traffic flow. The other challenges assumptions, pivots attack paths, and probes edge cases.
That collaboration matters most at the network layer, where issues rarely exist in isolation.
Pair hacking simulates how real attackers operate: collaboratively, iteratively, and opportunistically.
If you want broader vulnerability coverage, especially for complex online architectures, this is non-negotiable.
You can learn more about our penetration testing approach here: https://cyrex.tech/security-penetration-testing/
Protoceptor: Seeing Traffic as It Actually Behaves
Network audits rely on visibility. Most studios don’t have tooling that shows them how traffic behaves across platforms, protocols, and environments at once.Cyrex Protoceptor provides that visibility.
Protoceptor analyzes network traffic across any platform and tech stack, allowing our engineers to observe:
- Unexpected routing paths
- Protocol misuse
- Traffic patterns under stress
- Assumptions that don’t hold outside ideal conditions
This isn’t theoretical analysis. It's an observation based on real traffic behavior.
That’s where most network failures reveal themselves.
Why Security and Performance Are Inseparable at the Network Layer
Studios often treat security hardening and performance optimization as separate phases. At the network layer, that separation breaks down.
- Security controls affect latency.
- Routing decisions affect exploitability.
- Rate limiting changes how systems behave under load.
- Network bottlenecks create new attack surfaces.
This is why network audits should happen before final load testing, not after.
When network behavior is understood early, load simulations become more accurate, and security decisions don’t introduce late-stage instability.
This is also where network audits inform better load testing strategies using tools like Cyrex Swarm, which simulates millions of concurrent users at the network level rather than relying solely on application calls. https://cyrex.tech/load-testing/
When Studios Should Run a Network Infrastructure Audit
Based on our engagements, network audits deliver the most value at three moments:- Pre-launch, before final load testing and certification
- Pre-scale, when expanding regions, CCU targets, or backend services
- Post-incident, to understand what failed and why defenses didn’t behave as expected
Final Thoughts
If your studio runs an online game, your network is already being probed. By players, by automated tools, and by attackers looking for the path of least resistance.A network infrastructure audit doesn’t replace penetration testing or load testing. It connects them.
It shows you how traffic actually behaves when assumptions break down. And it gives your team the clarity to harden security and performance without trading one for the other.
Launch is a one-way door. If you’re scaling a live service or hardening a new backend, the network layer is where your assumptions go to die. Don't leave your most critical infrastructure to chance, secure your perimeter with a Cyrex Network Audit: https://cyrex.tech/contact/