SecureTCG: a lightweight cheating‐detection protocol for P2P multiplayer online trading card games

Abstract

Online gaming is today a very lucrative market, with millions of users all around the globe. At the same time, the increasing popularity and complexity of such games implies the need of deploying cheating‐detection mechanisms for ensuring the continuous interest of honest users in playing. The development of secure and efficient solutions for online games is, however, a challenging issue. This is especially true in P2P environments, in which the lack of a central trusted entity monitoring the game greatly facilitates the activity of malicious players. Aiming to tackle this issue, this paper presents SecureTCG, a protocol for detecting cheating attempts in P2P multiplayer card games where the players use their own decks to play, such as the so‐called trading card games. In summary, SecureTCG allows the multiple players participating in a trading card game match to detect cheating attempts as soon as they are made and without the intervention of third parties, supports multiple players and different game styles, displays tolerance to players’ dropouts during a match, prevents collusion among any number of players, provides (optional) after‐match auditability mechanisms, and has a reduced computational cost. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Securetrade: a secure protocol based on transferable E-cash for exchanging cards in P2P trading card games.

“…For example, in (PITTMAN;GAUTHIERDICKEY, 2013;SIMPLICIO JR. et al, 2014), the players may send after-match information to the server to prove that a user tried to cheat, e.g., by modifying the sequence or contents of their deck during a match. If a player sends to the server the list of cards employed by an adversary, the server should also be able to verify the usage of cards that were not under a malicious player's possession at the time of the match (e.g., because he/she had traded it earlier).…”

“…When considering mobile applications, however, a peer-topeer (P2P) architecture may present advantages over the client-server one (PITTMAN; GAUTHIERDICKEY, 2013;SIMPLICIO JR. et al, 2014). The reason is that a clientserver model obliges players to have a continuous Internet connection when trading or playing, preventing them to do any of those actions otherwise.…”

“…Cards of the same class have the same class identifier number (C ID), and in games that allow players to have several cards of the same class, each instance of these cards has a unique identifier (UID), that univocally identifies that card in the system. This UID can then be used by in-game cheat-detection protocols to identify the card (PITTMAN;GAUTHIERDICKEY, 2013;SIMPLICIO JR. et al, 2014).…”

“…Following the notation of Pittman andGauthierDickey (2013) andSimplicio Jr. et al (2014), the architecture (presented in Figure 3) of a P2P TCG encompasses a game server and the players.…”

“…A trading card game (TCG) is a type of card game in which, instead of using a fixed deck, each player creates his/her own deck from a subset of all cards made available by the game provider (SIMPLICIO JR. et al, 2014). During a match, players usually do not share their cards with their opponents; hence, as many different cards may exist, one important part of the game is to build decks that support a target strategy or game style.…”