CheatProof Playout for Centralized and Serverless Online Games

Source: www.cs.duke.edu
Topic: Cheat

Short Desciption:
5 CheatProof Game Interac. tion. Most realtime strategy games require interaction ... out is preserved with lookahead cheat prevention the. game and all ...

 

Content Inside:
CheatProof Playout for Centralized and Serverless Online GamesPage 1CheatProof Playout for Centralizedand Serverless Online GamesNathaniel E. BaughmanMarc LiberatoreBrian Neil Levinebaughman@cs.umass.eduliberato@cs.uma ss.edubrian@cs.umass.eduDept. of Computer Science University of Massachusetts Amherst MA 01003AbstractWe explore exploits possible for cheating in realtime multiplayer games for both clientserver andserverless architectures. We offer the first formalization of cheating in online games and propose aninitial set of strong solutions. We propose a protocol that has provable anticheating guarantees isprovably safe and live but suffers a performancepenalty. We then develop an extended version of thisprotocol called asynchronous synchronization whichavoids the penalty is serverless offers provable anticheating guarantees is robust in the face of packetloss and provides for significantly increased communication performance. This technique is applicable tocommon game features as well as clustering and cellbased techniques for massively multiplayer games.Specifically we provide a zeroknowledge proof protocol so that players are within a specific range of eachother and otherwise have no notion of their distance.Our performance claims are backed by analysis usinga simulation based on real game traces.1 IntroductionThe three primary factors that affect the quality ofonline massively multiplayer games are: timely playout of realtime interaction; scalability of communication and game architectures to large numbers ofusers; and the prevention or detection of cheatingplayers. Although cheating abounds in current gameplay on the Internet there is little or no real securityto prevent cheating in online games. Previous workin prevention and detection of cheaters in games hasbeen largely relegated to metal poker 1] and similargames.All authors were supported in part by the National ScienceFoundation award ANI033055.Modifications togames are often sophisticatedopensourcecom ...