Extended FAQ

Our extended FAQ covers a bit less common questions and answers that you may have. For a more common matters, please visit our basic FAQ instead.

Who has created ASF?

ASF was created by Archi in October 2015. In case you were wondering, I'm a Steam user just like you. Apart from playing games, I also love to put my skills and determination to use, which you can explore right now. There is no big company involved here, no team of developers and no $1M of budget to cover all of that - just me, fixing things that are not broken.

However, ASF is open-source project, and I can't express enough that I'm not behind everything that you can see here. We have a few other ASF projects that are being developed almost exclusively by other developers. Even core ASF project has a lot of contributors that helped me to make all of this happen. On top of that, there are several third-party services supporting ASF development, especially GitHub, JetBrains and Crowdin. You also can't forget about all the awesome libraries and tools that made ASF happen, such as Rider that we use as IDE (we love ReSharper additions) and especially SteamKit2 without which ASF would not exist in the first place. ASF also wouldn't be where it is today without my sponsors, patrons and various donators, supporting me in everything that I'm doing here.

Thank you all for helping in ASF development! You're awesome.

Why was ASF created in the first place?

ASF was created with primary purpose of being fully automated Steam farming tool for Linux, without a need of any external dependencies (such as Steam client). In fact, this still remains its primary purpose and focus, because my concept of ASF didn't change since then and I'm still using it in exactly the same way as I used it back in 2015. Of course, there was really a lot of changes since then, and I'm very happy to see how far ASF has progressed, mostly thanks to its users, because I'd never code even half of the features if it was for myself only.

It's nice to note that ASF was never made to compete with other, similar programs, especially Idle Master, because ASF was never designed to be a desktop/user app, and it still isn't today. If you analyze primary purpose of ASF described above, then you'll see how Idle master is the exact opposite of all of that. While you can most definitely find similar to ASF programs today, nothing was good enough for me back then (and still isn't today), so I created my own software, the way I wanted it. Over time users have migrated to ASF mainly due to robustness, stability and security, but also all the features that I've developed across all those years. Today, ASF is better than ever before.

OK, where is the catch? What do you gain from sharing ASF?

There is no catch, I created ASF for myself and shared it with the rest of the community in hope that it'll come useful. Exactly the same thing happened back in 1991, when Linus Torvalds shared his first Linux kernel with the rest of the world. There is no hidden malware, data mining, crypto mining or any other activity that would generate any monetary benefit for me. ASF project is supported entirely by non-obligatory donations sent by happy users such as you. You can use ASF in exactly the same way how I'm using it, and if you like it, you can always buy me a coffee, showing your gratitude for what I'm doing.

I'm also using ASF as a perfect example of a modern C# project that always strikes for perfection and best practices, be it with technology, project management or the code itself. It's my definition of "things done right", so if by any chance you manage to learn something useful from my project, then that will make me only more happy.

Right after launching ASF I've lost all my accounts/items/friends/...!

Statistically speaking, regardless how sad it is, it's guaranteed that shortly after launching ASF there will be at least one guy who will die in a car accident. The difference is that nobody sane will blame ASF for causing it, but for some reason there are people who will accuse ASF of the same just because it happened to their Steam accounts instead. Of course we can understand the reasoning for that, after all ASF operates within Steam platform, so naturally people will accuse everything that happened to their Steam-related property regardless of lack of any evidence that ASF is even remotely connected with that whatsoever.

ASF, as stated in FAQ as well as question above, is free of malware, spyware, data mining and any other potentially unwanted activity, especially submission of your sensitive Steam details or taking over your digital property. If something like this has happened to you, we can only say that we're sorry for your loss and recommend you to contact Steam support which hopefully will assist you in the recovery process - because we're not responsible for what happened to you in any way and our conscience is clear. If you believe otherwise, that's your decision, it's pointless to elaborate further, if the above resources providing objective and verifiable ways to confirm our statement didn't convince you, then it's not like anything we write here will anyway.

However, the above doesn't mean that your actions done without a common sense with ASF can't contribute to a security issue. For example, you could disregard our security guidelines, expose ASF's IPC interface to the whole internet, and then be surprised that somebody got in and robbed you out of all items. People do it all the time, they think that if there is no domain or any connection to their IP address then nobody will for sure find out their ASF instance. Right as you read it, there are thousands if not more fully-automated bots crawling through the web, including random IP address searching for vulnerabilities to discover, and ASF as a quite popular program is also a target of those. We already had enough of people that got "hacked" through their own stupidity like that, so try to learn from the mistakes of others and be smarter.

Same goes for security of your PC. Yes, having malware on your PC ruins every single security aspect of ASF, as it can read sensitive details from ASF config files, ASF process memory and even influence the program to do stuff that it wouldn't do otherwise. No, the last crack you've obtained from doubtful source was not a "false positive" as somebody has told you, it's one of the most effective ways to gain control over somebody's PC, the guy will infect himself and he'll even follow the instructions how to, fascinating.

Is using ASF completely safe and free of all risks then? No, we'd be bunch of hypocrites stating so, as every software has its security-oriented problems. Contrary to what a lot of companies are doing, we're trying to be as transparent as possible in our security advisories and as soon as we find out even a hypothetical situation where ASF could contribute in any way to a potentially unwanted from security perspective situation, we announce it immediately. This is what happened with CVE-2021-32794 for example, even though ASF didn't have any security flaw per-se, but rather a bug that could lead to user accidentally creating one.

How do I verify that the downloaded files are genuine?

As part of our releases on GitHub, we utilize a very similar verification process as the one used by Debian. In every official release starting with ASF V5.1.3.3, in addition to zip files you can find SHA512SUMS and SHA512SUMS.sign files. Download them for verification purposes together with the zip files of your choice.

Firstly, you should use SHA512SUMS file in order to verify that SHA-512 checksum of the selected zip files matches the one we calculated ourselves. On Linux, you can use sha512sum utility for that purpose.

$ sha512sum -c --ignore-missing SHA512SUMS
ASF-linux-x64.zip: OK

On Windows, we can do that from powershell, although you have to manually verify with SHA512SUMS:

PS > Get-Content SHA512SUMS | Select-String -Pattern ASF-linux-x64.zip

f605e573cc5e044dd6fadbc44f6643829d11360a2c6e4915b0c0b8f5227bc2a257568a014d3a2c0612fa73907641d0cea455138d2e5a97186a0b417abad45ed9  ASF-linux-x64.zip


PS > Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA512 -Path ASF-linux-x64.zip

Algorithm       Hash                                                                   Path
---------       ----                                                                   ----
SHA512          F605E573CC5E044DD6FADBC44F6643829D11360A2C6E4915B0C0B8F5227BC2A2575... ASF-linux-x64.zip

This way we ensured that whatever was written to SHA512SUMS matches the resulting files and they weren't tampered with. However, it doesn't prove yet that SHA512SUMS file you checked against really comes from us. For that, we'll use SHA512SUMS.sign file, which holds digital PGP signature proving the authenticity of SHA512SUMS. We can use gpg utility for that purpose, both on Linux and Windows (change gpg command into gpg.exe on Windows).

$ gpg --verify SHA512SUMS.sign SHA512SUMS
gpg: Signature made Mon 02 Aug 2021 00:34:18 CEST
gpg:                using EDDSA key 224DA6DB47A3935BDCC3BE17A3D181DF2D554CCF
gpg: Can't check signature: No public key

As you can see, the file indeed holds a valid signature, but of unknown origin. You'll need to import ArchiBot's public key that we sign the SHA-512 sums with for full validation.

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JustArchi-ArchiBot/JustArchi-ArchiBot/main/ArchiBot_public.asc -o ArchiBot_public.asc
$ gpg --import ArchiBot_public.asc
gpg: /home/archi/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
gpg: key A3D181DF2D554CCF: public key "ArchiBot <[email protected]>" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1

Finally, you can verify the SHA512SUMS file again:

$ gpg --verify SHA512SUMS.sign SHA512SUMS
gpg: Signature made Mon 02 Aug 2021 00:34:18 CEST
gpg:                using EDDSA key 224DA6DB47A3935BDCC3BE17A3D181DF2D554CCF
gpg: Good signature from "ArchiBot <[email protected]>" [unknown]
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: 224D A6DB 47A3 935B DCC3  BE17 A3D1 81DF 2D55 4CCF

This has verified that the SHA512SUMS.sign holds a valid signature of our 224DA6DB47A3935BDCC3BE17A3D181DF2D554CCF key for SHA512SUMS file that you've verified against.

You could be wondering where the last warning comes from. You've successfully imported our key, but didn't decide to trust it just yet. While this is not mandatory, we can cover it as well. Normally this includes verifying through different channel (e.g. phone call, SMS) that the key is valid, then signing the key with your own to trust it. For this example, you can consider this wiki entry as such (very weak) different channel, since the original key comes from ArchiBot's profile. In any case we'll assume that you have enough of confidence as it is.

Firstly, generate private key for yourself, if you don't have one just yet. We'll use --quick-gen-key as a quick example.

$ gpg --batch --passphrase '' --quick-gen-key "$(whoami)"
gpg: /home/archi/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
gpg: key E4E763905FAD148B marked as ultimately trusted
gpg: directory '/home/archi/.gnupg/openpgp-revocs.d' created
gpg: revocation certificate stored as '/home/archi/.gnupg/openpgp-revocs.d/8E5D685F423A584569686675E4E763905FAD148B.rev'

Now you can sign our key with yours in order to trust it:

$ gpg --sign-key 224DA6DB47A3935BDCC3BE17A3D181DF2D554CCF

pub  ed25519/A3D181DF2D554CCF
     created: 2021-05-22  expires: never       usage: SC
     trust: unknown       validity: unknown
sub  cv25519/E527A892E05B2F38
     created: 2021-05-22  expires: never       usage: E
[ unknown] (1). ArchiBot <[email protected]>


pub  ed25519/A3D181DF2D554CCF
     created: 2021-05-22  expires: never       usage: SC
     trust: unknown       validity: unknown
 Primary key fingerprint: 224D A6DB 47A3 935B DCC3  BE17 A3D1 81DF 2D55 4CCF

     ArchiBot <[email protected]>

Are you sure that you want to sign this key with your
key "archi" (E4E763905FAD148B)

Really sign? (y/N) y

And done, after trusting our key, gpg should no longer display the warning when verifying:

$ gpg --verify SHA512SUMS.sign SHA512SUMS
gpg: Signature made Mon 02 Aug 2021 00:34:18 CEST
gpg:                using EDDSA key 224DA6DB47A3935BDCC3BE17A3D181DF2D554CCF
gpg: Good signature from "ArchiBot <[email protected]>" [full]

Notice the [unknown] trust indicator changing into [full] once you signed our key with yours.

Congratulations, you've verified that nobody has tampered with the release you've downloaded! 👍

It's April the 1st and the ASF language changed into something strange, what is going on?

CONGRATULASHUNS ON DISCOVERIN R APRIL FOOLS EASTR EGG! If you didn't set custom CurrentCulture option, then ASF on April the 1st will actually use LOLcat language instead of your system language. If by any chance you'd like to disable that behaviour, you can simply set CurrentCulture to the locale that you'd like to use instead. It's also nice to note that you can enable our easter egg unconditionally, by setting your CurrentCulture to qps-Ploc value.