Is runtime verification applicable to cheat detection?

DeLap, Margaret; Knutsson, Björn; Hong, Li; Sokolsky, Oleg; Sammapun, Usa; Lee, Insup; Tsarouchis, Christos

doi:10.1145/1016540.1016553

Cited by 23 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 7 publications

(6 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…It can be envisaged that cheat detection would perform well when game designers and developers use their knowledge about cheating to describe problems in commercial games. 12 …”

Section: Validation Of the Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Behaviour-Based Cheat Detection in Multiplayer Games with Event-B

Tian

Brooke

Bosser

2012

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. Cheating is a key issue in multiplayer games as it causes unfairness which reduces legitimate users' satisfaction and is thus detrimental to game revenue. Many commercial solutions prevent cheats by reacting to specific implementations of cheats. As a result, they respond more slowly to fast-changing cheat techniques. This work proposes a framework using Event-B to describe and detect cheats from server-visible game behaviours. We argue that this cheat detection is more resistant to changing cheat techniques.

show abstract

“…It can be envisaged that cheat detection would perform well when game designers and developers use their knowledge about cheating to describe problems in commercial games. 12 …”

Section: Validation Of the Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, it is proposed in [12] that high-level game rules can be described in temporal logic and used to verify the properties of game players at the run-time. The main difference is that our cheat detection does not reply on either rule-enforcement or rule-violation.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behaviour-Based Cheat Detection in Multiplayer Games with Event-B

Tian

Brooke

Bosser

2012

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…While cheating is regarded as a crucial challenge to the design of online games, a great deal of effort has been devoted to cheat prevention schemes [2][3][4][5]. Since game cheats often exploit loopholes in game rules or specific implementations, researchers attempt to guarantee the integrity of game systems by, for example, runtime verification of transaction atomicity [4].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since game cheats often exploit loopholes in game rules or specific implementations, researchers attempt to guarantee the integrity of game systems by, for example, runtime verification of transaction atomicity [4]. However, the proof of correctness approach is not applicable to bot detection problems because game bots do not necessarily "cheat."…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying MMORPG Bots: A Traffic Analysis Approach

Chen

Jiang

Huang

et al. 2008

EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) have become extremely popular among network gamers. Despite their success, one of MMORPG's greatest challenges is the increasing use of game bots, that is, autoplaying game clients. The use of game bots is considered unsportsmanlike and is therefore forbidden. To keep games in order, game police, played by actual human players, often patrol game zones and question suspicious players. This practice, however, is labor-intensive and ineffective. To address this problem, we analyze the traffic generated by human players versus game bots and propose general solutions to identify game bots. Taking Ragnarok Online as our subject, we study the traffic generated by human players and game bots. We find that their traffic is distinguishable by 1) the regularity in the release time of client commands, 2) the trend and magnitude of traffic burstiness in multiple time scales, and 3) the sensitivity to different network conditions. Based on these findings, we propose four strategies and two ensemble schemes to identify bots. Finally, we discuss the robustness of the proposed methods against countermeasures of bot developers, and consider a number of possible ways to manage the increasingly serious bot problem.

show abstract

“…Useful surveys of the problem are due to Yan and Randell [42], Lyhyaoui et al [28], and Webb and Soh [40]. One common approach to defeat a variety of cheats involves augmenting the client-side computer with monitoring functionality to perform cheat detection (e.g., PunkBuster and [12,13,26,31,34]). Such approaches require consideration of how to defend this functionality from tampering, and some commercial examples have met with resistance from the user community (e.g., World of Warcraft's Warden, see [39]).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Server-side verification of client behavior in online games

Bethea

Cochran

Reiter

2008

ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. Secur.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Online gaming is a lucrative and growing industry but one that is slowed by cheating that compromises the gaming experience and hence drives away players (and revenue). In this paper we develop a technique by which game developers can enable game operators to validate the behavior of game clients as being consistent with valid execution of the sanctioned client software. Our technique employs symbolic execution of the client software to extract constraints on clientside state implied by each client-to-server message, and then uses constraint solving to determine whether the sequence of client-to-server messages can be "explained" by any possible user inputs, in light of the server-to-client messages already received. The requisite constraints and solving components can be developed either simultaneously with the game or retroactively for existing games. We demonstrate our approach in two case studies: one of the open-source game XPilot, and one of a game similar to Pac-Man of our own design.

show abstract

Is runtime verification applicable to cheat detection?

Cited by 23 publications

References 7 publications

Behaviour-Based Cheat Detection in Multiplayer Games with Event-B

Behaviour-Based Cheat Detection in Multiplayer Games with Event-B

Identifying MMORPG Bots: A Traffic Analysis Approach

Server-side verification of client behavior in online games

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About