CTL
8 March 2011 - 14h00
OpenConflict: Preventing Real Time Map Hacks in Online Games
by Elie Bursztein from Stanford Security Lab
Abstract: We present a generic tool, Kartograph, that lifts the fog of war in online
real-time strategy games by snooping on the memory used by the
game. Kartograph is passive and cannot be detected remotely.
Motivated by these passive attacks we set out to develop secure
protocols for distributing game state among players so that each
client only has data he or she is allowed to see. We show that we can
run the game with distributed state with only a 22-millisecond
overhead per state update on a single core machine.
While this overhead is already below
human perception, even lower latency can be obtained on multi-core
machines. Before we built the OpenConflict system we conducted an
extensive study of the amount of data and network traffic generated by
a popular real-time game, Starcraft~II. This data helped us predict
the performance of OpenConflict before we built it. We present the
results of the study for other researchers who wish to experiment with
secure protocol design for online games.
