• Files. hover.ini beside the exe (the port's settings: video, controller, levels, multiplayer). The game reads its mazes, textures and sounds from game\hover.
• The registry. The game keeps its own settings under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, as the original did. --headless points HKEY_CURRENT_USER at a scratch key (Software\hover-recomp\headless\<pid>) and deletes it on exit.
• The clipboard. Level share codes and join codes are copied and pasted only when you pick those menu items.
• Processes. --record starts ffmpeg from PATH. Edit settings opens hover.ini in its associated editor.
• The network. Only during online play: hosting listens on one UDP port (7795 unless you pick another), and joining talks to the one address you gave. Nothing is sent anywhere else, and the game never connects on its own. A join code is the host's IP address and port, written in base 32. It is not a secret, so share it only with the people you want in the game.

It handles no credentials.

Packets are plain UDP, with no encryption and no authentication. Anyone who can reach a host's port can join while seats are free, so host on a LAN or a private network such as Tailscale. If you forward a port to the internet, anyone who finds it can take a seat. A client accepts packets only from its host, and the host accepts inputs from each peer only for that peer's own seats. Every tick and count read off the wire is bounds-checked before it is used (src/runtime/net.c, recv_thread).

The game's code is recompiled C running in-process, and it calls the real Win32 API with the game's own arguments. Maze and texture files are parsed by the game's 1995 code, so treat maze and texture files from untrusted sources with the caution due any old program.

Report a problem privately through GitHub's Report a vulnerability on this repository, rather than in a public issue.