Watchmen: Scalable Cheat-Resistant Support for Distributed Multi-player Online Games

Details

Ressource 1Download: Yahyavi13ICDCS.pdf (417.22 [Ko])
State: Public
Version: author
Serval ID
serval:BIB_44A9D5A0F76F
Type
Inproceedings: an article in a conference proceedings.
Collection
Publications
Title
Watchmen: Scalable Cheat-Resistant Support for Distributed Multi-player Online Games
Title of the conference
Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)
Author(s)
Yahyavi A., Huguenin K., Gascon-Samson J., Kienzle J., Kemme B.
Publisher
IEEE
Address
Philadelphia, PA, USA
ISBN
978-0-7695-5000-8
Publication state
Published
Issued date
07/2013
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Pages
134-144
Language
english
Abstract
Multi-player online games are inherently distributed applications, and a wide range of distributed architectures have been proposed. However, only few successful commercial systems follow such approaches, even given their benefits, due to one main hurdle: the easiness with which cheaters can disrupt the game state computation and dissemination, perform illegal actions, or unduly gain access to sensitive information. The challenge is that any measures used to address cheating must meet the heavy scalability and tight latency requirements of fast paced games.
We propose Watchmen, the first distributed scalable protocol designed with cheat detection and prevention in mind that supports fast paced games. It is based on a randomized dynamic proxy scheme for both the dissemination and verification of actions. Furthermore, Watchmen reduces the information exposed to players close to the minimum required to render the game. We build our proof-of-concept prototype on top of Quake III. We show that Watchmen, while scaling to hundreds of players and meeting the tight latency requirements of first person shooter games, is able to significantly reduce opportunities to cheat, even in the presence of collusion.
Web of science
Create date
01/12/2016 9:40
Last modification date
20/08/2019 13:49
Usage data