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AC/DC: an algorithm for cheating detection by cheating

Published: 26 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Time cheats represent some of the most crucial issues in online gaming. Since they act on timing properties of generated game events, these malicious schemes are particularly difficult to thwart when distributed games are deployed over peer-to-peer architectures. Indeed, the absence of a global clock shared among peers enables cheaters to see into the future by waiting for events generated by other peers before generating its own ones (lookahead cheat). This may give an unfair advantage to the cheater. We consider a version of lookahead cheat generalized in the context of real-time (i.e., not round-based) games. To face this time cheat, we present AC/DC, an Algorithm for Cheating Detection by Cheating. This algorithm enables to detect cheaters based on monitoring of network latencies. The basic idea is that of conducting against each suspected peer a sort of cheating counterattack, by delaying events before notifying them to the (hypothetic) cheater. This permits to detect whether that peer waits for these events before generating its own ones. Our claim is that an approach based on the monitoring of communication patterns among peers allows cheat detection without affecting the performances of the game.

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cover image ACM Conferences
NOSSDAV '06: Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
May 2006
168 pages
ISBN:1595932852
DOI:10.1145/1378191
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 26 May 2006

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Author Tags

  1. cheating
  2. online games
  3. peer-to-peer
  4. synchronization

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Cited By

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  • (2015)In sync with fair play!Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology10.1145/2832932.2832953(1-11)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2015
  • (2015)Adaptation to TV Delays Based on the User Behaviour towards a Cheating-Free Second Screen EntertainmentEntertainment Computing - ICEC 201510.1007/978-3-319-24589-8_35(424-432)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2015
  • (2014)SecureTCG: a lightweight cheating‐detection protocol for P2P multiplayer online trading card gamesSecurity and Communication Networks10.1002/sec.9527:12(2412-2431)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2014
  • (2013)Peer-to-peer architectures for massively multiplayer online gamesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/2522968.252297746:1(1-51)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2013
  • (2013)Towards providing security for mobile gamesProceedings of the eighth ACM international workshop on Mobility in the evolving internet architecture10.1145/2505906.2505912(47-52)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2013
  • (2013)WatchmenProceedings of the 2013 IEEE 33rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems10.1109/ICDCS.2013.62(134-144)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2013
  • (2012)On crimes and punishments in virtual worldsEthics and Information Technology10.1007/s10676-011-9281-714:2(73-87)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2012
  • (2011)Enforcing game rules in untrusted P2P-based MMVEsProceedings of the 4th International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques10.5555/2151054.2151106(288-295)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2011
  • (2010)Integrating players, reputation and ranking to manage cheating in MMOGsProceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/1822348.1822351(17-24)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2010
  • (2009)A statistical approach to cheating countermeasure in P2P MOGsProceedings of the 6th IEEE Conference on Consumer Communications and Networking Conference10.5555/1700527.1700833(1267-1271)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2009
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