I’ve been working on a large-scale Roblox project and at some point I decided to stop using RemoteEvents directly everywhere and build a proper networking abstraction layer on top of them instead
The core idea was simple — instead of doing this for every single feature in the game
local remote = Instance.new("RemoteEvent")
remote.Name = "SomethingHappened"
remote.Parent = game.ReplicatedStorage.Remotes
-- and then repeat this 50 times for 50 different systems
I could just do this
Network.Fire("Something Happened", data)
The library handles creating the remote if it doesn’t exist yet registering listeners automatically and routing the data through a single MAIN remote for bootstrapping The client asks the server to create remotes on demand which keeps everything centralized and avoids the mess of manually managing a folder full of RemoteEvents
Beyond the ergonomics there were two other real motivations behind this
The first was bandwidth Roblox has rate limits and size limits per remote so I added automatic compression for tables and strings above a certain size The caller never knows this is happening the data goes in raw and comes out raw on the other end
The second was observability When every network call goes through one place you can add logging throttling and debug tooling in a single spot instead of hunting across 50 different scripts
I was pretty happy with the result and it genuinely made the codebase much cleaner to work with for a team This kind of architecture is the same reason Axios exists instead of everyone calling XMLHttpRequest directly
Then I started looking at the deserialization side and something clicked that I think is worth sharing
This is roughly what the packet decoding looks like on the receiving end
function DecodePacket(packet)
local packetData = packet[1]
local packetIndex = packet[2]
for i, isEncoded in pairs(packetIndex) do
local data = packetData[i]
if isEncoded then
decoded = Compress.Decode(data)
if wasTable then
decoded = HttpService:JSONDecode(decoded)
end
end
end
end
The server receives a packet trusts that packet[1] contains the data and packet[2] contains the encoding index then decompresses and deserializes whatever comes in There is no schema validation anywhere in this layer
This reminded me of a broader class of vulnerabilities where trusted deserialization becomes the attack surface The most famous recent example in the web world was the prototype pollution pattern in JavaScript ecosystems where attackers could craft payloads that poisoned the prototype chain during deserialization and more recently the React2Shell exploit showed how deserialization trust on the server side can be weaponized in ways the original developers never anticipated Roblox and Lua obviously don’t have a prototype chain so that exact vector doesn’t exist here but the analogous problems do
If an exploiter sends a malformed packet where packet[2] claims the data is compressed but packet[1] contains garbage the server will attempt Compress.Decode(garbage) The pcall wrapping this will catch the error silently which sounds safe but the silent failure means the system just drops the argument and moves on with nil in its place Depending on what the calling code does with that nil you now have an undefined behavior path on the server that was triggered entirely by client input
More interesting is the case where the table decodes successfully but contains unexpected keys or crafted values If the data coming out of JSONDecode is passed directly into game logic without validation — things like quantity or itemId or price — then the attacker controls those values A large enough table payload also creates memory pressure on the server side during the decode loop
The irony is sharp The abstraction layer exists to remove friction and it does that really well but that same friction removal makes every developer using the layer trust that the data arrived clean Nobody reads the Network module before writing a handler they just call Network.Fired("Buy"):Connect(function(player, itemId, price) and assume the types are correct because the API feels safe
This is the same dynamic as dangerouslySetInnerHTML in React The API is so convenient that it lowers your guard about what you are actually doing
The abstraction solved the ergonomics problem beautifully but created a false sense of security one layer above it The fix isn’t to remove the abstraction — it’s to be deliberate about validating the content of decoded packets server-side before touching any game logic with them Treat everything that comes out of DecodePacket the same way you would treat raw HTTP request body data never trust it never assume the types are what you expect
Curious if anyone else has run into this pattern or found a clean way to add schema validation at the network layer without killing the ergonomics that made the abstraction worth building in the first place
