Abstract
A fundamental aspect of many multiplayer online games is the ability to trade items between players. Trading may occur with items that were found in the virtual environment, included as pieces of the game, or purchased by the player as assets. Regardless of the types of items, any multiplayer game that supports trading or exchanging items in the game must do so in a secure manner. We have developed a protocol to solve the problem of secure peer-to-peer trading in games in which the primary concern is that items are exchanged fairly, and additionally that items are not duplicated. Our protocol enables one-way and two-way trades and can be extended to multi-item trades in both small- and large-scale games where trades last only for the duration of a session or are persistent. We show that our protocol addresses the security threats which it might encounter, and then provide an analysis to demonstrate its scalability.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Asokan, N., Shoup, V., Waidner, M.: Asynchronous protocols for optimistic fair exchange. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 86–99 (1998)
Bao, F.: Efficient and practical fair exchange protocols with off-line ttp. In: Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 77–85 (1998)
Ben-Or, M., Goldreich, O., Micali, S., Rivest, R.L.: A fair protocol for signing contracts. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 36(1), 40–46 (1990)
Bharambe, A.R., Agrawal, M., Seshan, S.: Mercury: Supporting scalable multi-attribute range queries. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM (2004)
Buyukkaya, E., Abdallah, M., Cavagna, R.: Vorogame: A hybrid p2p architecture for massively multiplayer games. In: Proceedings of the 6th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, pp. 1–5 (2009)
Castro, M., Liskov, B.: Practical byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 20(4), 398–461 (2002)
Dåmgard, I.B.: Practical and provably secure release of a secret and exchange of signatures. In: Helleseth, T. (ed.) Advances in Cryptography—EUROCRYPT’93. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 765, pp. 200–217. Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg (1993)
Fontoura, M., Ionescu, M., Minsky, N.: Decentralized peer-to-peer auctions. Electronic Commerce Research 5(1), 7–24 (2005). doi:10.1023/B:ELEC.0000045971.43390.c0
Franklin, M.K., Reiter, M.K.: Fair exchange with a semi-trusted third party. In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications, Security, pp. 1–5 (1997)
GauthierDickey, C., Ritzdorf, C.: Secure peer-to-peer trading for multiplayer games. In: 11th International Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames’12), pp. 1–6 (2012)
Knutsson, B., Lu, H., Xu, W., Hopkins, B.: Peer-to-peer support for massively multiplayer games. In: Proceedings of IEEE Infocom (2004)
Lamport, L., Shostak, R., Pease, M.: The Byzantine generals problem. ACM Trans Program Lang Syst 4(3):382–401, (1982) http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/357172.357176
Maymounkov, P., Mazières, D.: Kademlia: A peer-to-peer information system based on the xor metric. In: Druschel, P., Kaashoek, F., Rowstron, A. (eds.) Peer-to-Peer Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2429, pp. 53–65. Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg (2002)
Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. (2008) http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin
Okamoto, T., Ohta, K.: How to simultaneously exchange secrets by general assumptions. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ACM, pp. 184–192 (1994)
Pittman, D., GauthierDickey, C.: Match+guardian: A secure peer-to-peer trading card game protocol. Multimedia Systems pp. 1–12 (2012)
Ratnasamy, S., Francis, P., Handley, M., Karp, R., Schenker, S.: A scalable content-addressable network. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, pp. 161–172, (2001) http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/383059.383072
Rolli, D., Conrad, M., Neumann, D., Sorge, C.: An asynchronous and secure ascending peer-to-peer auction. In: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Economics of peer-to-peer systems, ACM, pp. 105–110 (2005)
Rooney, S., Bauer, D., Deydier, R.: A federated peer-to-peer network game architecture. IEEE Communications 42(5) (2004)
Rowstron, A.I.T., Druschel, P.: Pastry: Scalable, decentralized object location, and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer systems. In: Proceedings of the IFIP/ACM International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms, Springer-Verlag, pp. 329–350, (2001) http://research.microsoft.com/~antr/PAST/pastry
Stoica, I., Morris, R., Karger, D., Kaashoek, M.F., Balakrishnan, H.: Chord: A scalable peer-to-peer lookup service for internet applications. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, pp. 149–160, (2001) http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/383059.383071
Syverson, P.: Weakly secret bit commitment: Applications to lotteries and fair exchange. In: 11th IEEE Proceedings of Computer Security Foundations, Workshop, pp. 2–13 (1998)
Wierzbicki, A., Kucharski, T.: Fair and scalable peer-to-peer games of turns. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 1, pp. 250–256 (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
GauthierDickey, C., Ritzdorf, C. Secure peer-to-peer trading in small- and large-scale multiplayer games. Multimedia Systems 20, 595–607 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-014-0372-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-014-0372-2