How Beacon Protects Players and Creators: Making LBP Online Safe

In late 2021, Project Lighthouse private beta started from a blank slate. The first people to ever play on Beacon custom servers started from scratch. Beacon went public in 2023, and to date the community has become home to over 25,000 levels. However, it’s important to remember that the official LittleBigPlanet servers were shut down for a reason: they weren’t safe. To operate Beacon responsibly, we’ve had to craft a principled approach toward community safety.

A few things are missing from Beacon that players remember fondly from the official servers. Dive in doesn’t function (yet), players need join keys to play with others, and many of the 10 million community levels are missing from the server. Let’s learn about all the steps we’ve taken to protect the community when playing LBP online.

LBP Online Client Safety

The most obvious threats to LBP online players today are security vulnerabilities in the game client. There’s a critical difference between these two things:

1. The server: Beacon is where all your published levels live. It also helps you set up matches with others and handles things like comments and reviews.
2. The client: this is the game running on your console. All the stuff that happens in multiplayer sessions and regular gameplay are handled by the client

When you’re in an online multiplayer session, the server plays a minor role. It may help you get connected via matchmaking, but once someone connects to your session, the rest is all handled by the client. This is called peer to peer (P2P) multiplayer.

Peer to Peer Risks

P2P connections reduce the overhead required by the server. However, they also make our safety situation more complicated. Peer to peer multiplayer introduces risks such as:

• Malicious scripting: players can place down objects with scripts that can perform remote code execution attacks.
• Force join: players can forcibly join your session without your consent using fabricated PSN invites.
• Behavior: activity in your session cannot be moderated by the server, meaning you could be exposed to unwanted behavior.

Since the connections are peer to peer, players in your session may not even have to be connected to the same server as you. The server cannot control any of the factors above. Even banning a user from a server won’t help, because the user could forcibly join your session from another server.

Patchwork

Beacon requires the Patchwork security plugin to help mitigate some of the risks above. Patchwork mitigates the force join vulnerability by requiring join keys. These lobby passwords require you to have the same key as another user before you can join each other. This limits the threat of malicious scripting and unwanted behavior to people that you trust. Patchwork is included in our latest patching process when patching with Refresher. It only supports RPCS3 and PlayStation 3 with custom firmware or hybrid firmware. Patchwork does not support PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 5.

Patchwork support is coming for PS Vita soon. The plugin will eventually support blocking malicious scripting. When that happens, we will be able to turn on Dive In again.

Is Playing LBP Online Safe?

No. However, the Patchwork security patch mitigates the most critical threats on PlayStation 3 and RPCS3 when playing Beacon custom servers by LBP Union. Patchwork is not available on PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 5.

Project Lighthouse is Open Source

Trustworthy server code is important when playing LBP online. Beacon is powered by the open source LittleBigPlanet server Project Lighthouse. This accomplishes several objectives:

• The code can be audited by community developers.
• Transparent code helps us catch and patch problems faster, reducing exploits and data breaches.
• Users can see exactly how the server works and how it will affect their privacy. Project Lighthouse has no hidden data collection.
• Open source makes maintaining the code in the long term possible. Developers can also use the code as a reference for their own projects.

Creator Rights and Moderation

Running an LBP online community is a serious project with unique needs. Creator rights and moderation are very important to all of us.

A Dedicated Team

We maintain a dedicated team of moderators called Starguard that watch over Beacon. These volunteers monitor grief reports and creation streams for inappropriate content and malicious activity. We select Starguard carefully and care deeply about making our moderation process quick, efficient, and fair for everyone.

Automation

Beacon uses Cloudflare’s CSAM scanning tool to automatically scan images across our entire domain. If a match is detected, the asset is automatically blocked and LBP Union is alerted. LBP Union is required to report our findings to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

Automation tools can make mistakes and can’t be fully relied upon, but they are an important tool in our arsenal when making Beacon the a safe place to play LBP online.

On the Leaked Archive

Last year, a massive archive of 10 million levels scraped from Sony’s official LittleBigPlanet servers was posted to archive.org. This is very important culturally for LittleBigPlanet, and we have received many requests to make the archive available directly from Beacon. However, we’ve chosen not to for several reasons:

• The archive was scraped from the official servers without Sony’s permission.
• We do not have the consent of the original creators of the levels to make them available.
• The archive contains inappropriate and even illegal content. It would be impossible to audit all 10 million levels.
• A large portion of these levels are spam.

Instead, we encourage players to reupload levels of their choice to Beacon. This makes levels easier to moderate and ensures that only the most valuable levels are reuploaded to Beacon.

Players are required to attribute the original authors in the descriptions of the levels. If we are ever contacted by the original authors of the levels with requests to move slots to their accounts or to remove the levels entirely, we will honor these requests. Creators can contact us with these requests on our contact page.

Responsible Patching

There are several ways to patch LittleBigPlanet to connect to a custom server, and each method offers a different level of transparency. At LBP Union, we prioritize approaches where players can

• Clearly see what server they’re connecting to.
• Understand the technical and platform‑level implications of the patching method they’re using.
• Consent and respect the systems involved

Understanding What You’re Doing

To play LBP online, players should know exactly what server they’re connecting to and how the patching process works. To connect to Beacon on PlayStation 3, players install custom or hybrid firmware on their console and patch their games using Refresher. This requires the player to choose the server URL that they want to use during patching.

In alternative patching methods, like distributed EBOOTs, .pkg distributions, and in-game script patching, the patching method is opaque. This means that it’s harder for the player to see the server URL.

In a worst-case scenario, not knowing what server you’re connecting to could result in you connecting to a server you don’t expect. For example, a server hosted by a malicious actor. Alternatively, you might think you’re connected to the server you want, like Beacon, but your connection could be routed through a malicious relay. This could result in man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, where a hacker can intercept your connection.

Understanding the Risks

Modifying your console and patching your game with Refresher is a very deliberate process. The process of patching your game requires you to understand the risks that come with it, such as:

• If you use PlayStation Network on PS3, modifying your console and your game breaks Sony’s terms of service. They could suspend service to your account at any time. (However, this hasn’t happened to anyone so far.)
• By connecting to a custom server like Beacon, you trust us to see your IP address, and you trust us with any content you upload like levels and photos.

With alternative patching methods, like distributed EBOOTs, .pkg files and in-game script patching reduces the need for player responsibility. Since it’s harder to know with certainty what server URL you’re patching to with each of these methods, it’s harder to understand the risks of connecting to the server.

A special case is script patching. Since script patching works on official firmware (non-jailbroken) consoles like PlayStation 3, 4, and 5,the player may not understand that they are exploiting Sony’s proprietary hardware. This is especially true on next generation consoles like PS4 and PS5, which Sony is far more protective of. PS4 and PS5 also cannot support the Patchwork security plugin, which means that those players would be at risk of other vulnerabilities. This is why Beacon doesn’t support script patching.

Respecting Intellectual Property and Services

Playing LBP online should be done not just responsibly but respectfully. When patching your game with Refresher to play on Beacon, you need your own copy of the game in order to play. The same isn’t necessarily true for other methods like distributed EBOOTs, which is a form of piracy. We have a zero-tolerance policy for piracy at LBP Union and will provide no support to a user if we suspect they obtained their copy of the game illegally.

Respect goes not just for intellectual property but for services as well. For console players, PlayStation Network is needed to play LBP online. The PlayStation 3 and Vita are last generation consoles that have mostly fallen out of support by Sony. However, PlayStation 4 and 5 are next generation consoles that Sony has paid far more attention to in terms of security and updates. Exploiting these consoles to play LBP online is something we’re uncomfortable with, which is another reason why we do not support script patching for Beacon.

Lighting the Way Forward Responsibly

We see Beacon as the future of LBP online, and our mission is to light the way forward responsibly. We are committed to responsible patching, creator rights, moderation, and client safety. We are looking forward to future technological innovations for LittleBigPlanet online, like script filtering in Patchwork and Patchwork support for LBP Vita. We also hope to see more advanced server software in the future when it’s time to upgrade Project Lighthouse’s aging software to the next generation.

Thank you for your support and for playing on Beacon! If you found this post informative, we would really appreciate it if you shared it with a friend to spread the word about our mission.

Attribution

Image thumbnail by Benji and Apollo.