Cheat Protection in Online Games
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Abstract
Competitive online video gaming (or eSports for short) is a booming industry. Current estimates predict global revenues of well over 1 billion dollars by the end of this year, Twitch.tv the largest eSports streaming network is now one of the biggest sites on the internet, and the International Olympic Committee is even considering to include eSports in the 2024 Summer Olympics.
With this rising popularity comes a dark side in the form of cheating, however. Cheaters are willing to subvert the rules of the game by any means necessary. Many of them pay monthly subscription fees to get access to exclusive cheating software created by hackers.
In this talk, I will discuss the most prevalent types of cheats used in online games and show how they give players a competitive advantage.
I will then highlight the various steps that go into creating a cheat and give an overview of the various techniques and tools hackers use in each step, ranging from debuggers, differential data analysis tools, API hooking, bytehacking, etc.
Next, I will present cheat mitigation strategies that can be incorporated into a game's design, and detection techniques that can be applied in both client-side and server-side cheat-protection software.
Finally, I will zoom in on some of the most popular client-side anti-cheat solutions and highlight some of their capabilities.
References
[1]
2019. Cheat Engine. https://www.cheatengine.org
[2]
Alexa. 2019. twitch.tv Competitive Analysis. https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twitch.tv
[3]
Stefano De Paoli and Aphra Kerr. 2010. "We Will Always Be One Step Ahead of Them" A Case Study on the Economy of Cheating in MMORPGs. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Vol. 2, 4 (2010).
[4]
Galen Hunt and Doug Brubacher. 1999. Detours: Binary Interception of Win 32 Functions. In 3rd USENIX Windows NT Symposium.
[5]
Reuters. 2019. Global esports revenues to top $1 billion in 2019: report. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-videogames-outlook/global-esports-revenues-to-top-1-billion-in-2019-report-idUSKCN1Q11XY
[6]
BBC Sport. 2018. Paris 2024 Olympics: Esports 'in talks' to be included as demonstration sport. https://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/43893891
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Published In
November 2019
87 pages
ISBN:9781450368353
DOI:10.1145/3338503
- General Chair:
- Paolo Falcarin,
- Program Chair:
- Michael 'MiZu' Zunke
Copyright © 2019 Owner/Author.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.
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Association for Computing Machinery
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Publication History
Published: 15 November 2019
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CCS '19
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CCS '19: 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
November 15, 2019
London, United Kingdom
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Overall Acceptance Rate 8 of 14 submissions, 57%
Upcoming Conference
CCS '25
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- sigsac
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