I need to talk with a couple of the vl guys

[Adron]

But not with the loader... Anyway, that's mostly semantics.

A server alone cannot have any anti-hack things in it (for Starcraft and Brood War, at least). You need modifications to the client. A loader provides these modifications in memory.

The server can have anti-hack things that the user of an unmodified client will automagically download and execute?

[Yoni]

I didn't think of that. *toasts Adron*

Has anyone ever tried this?

[Skywing]

I didn't think of that. *toasts Adron*

Has anyone ever tried this?

Yes.

There are several problems with that line of reasoning: First, all of the code the game client downloads with the purpose of execution is signed.  Unless somebody produces Blizzard's private key, that avenue is closed (at least for PC clients -- I've determined that Mac clients don't bother checking the sginature at all, however).

Battle.snp is still full of buffer overflows you could use to run remote code (such as an antihack thing).  The problem is this is much trickier to do than just sending a DLL for the game to load and run, and you'll have to do lots of changes for different games and/or game versions.  Not to mention the fact that it's possible (however highly unlikely, given their attitude towards "legacy" games) that these holes could be closed by Blizzard.