[quake3] non-cheatable game

Mike Hobbs mike at hobbshouse.org
Mon May 14 15:03:19 EDT 2007


I don't mean to throw cold water on your research and I don't know what 
your proposed approach is, but I'm 99.999% certain that it is impossible 
to absolutely prevent cheating on any system that the cheater has 
indiscriminate physical access to. (As an aside, this is one reason why 
DRM will never be effective on consumer devices.) Access to the source 
code makes it very easy to cheat, but even without access to the code, a 
hacker with a decompiler can do a lot. Even if you encrypt the binary 
and all messages into and out of it, the secret will have to be decoded 
and into the client's memory at some point. A hacker can then inject 
whatever he wants at that point.

 From a different perspective, it is possible for a server to ban a 
client that it "suspects" is cheating, but there is no way to absolutely 
prevent it in the first place.

- Mike

Mariano Ceccato wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> I'm an Italian researcher working in the field of software analysis 
> and evolution.
>
> The topic my group is currently working on is a related to software 
> security on network applications. Out goal is to identify which parts 
> of an existing software system can be tampered with by a malicious 
> user. We are also investigating a solution based on source-code 
> automatic transformation to change all the not-safe parts into 
> tamper-proof code.
>
> In case of a network game, such as Quake, we would like to modify the 
> game code in such a way that it is not longer possible by a malicious 
> player to install cheat-patch on the system in order to gain an 
> advantage over the other players.
>
> Of course my purpose is to write good research publications but, I 
> think, I can also contribute a lot to this project in case I will be 
> able to provide you non-cheatable game source code.
>
> To do that, I would need to know
> 1) the known cheat-patches that unfair players use,
> 2) kind of game design (if any)
> 3) game (and game-server) code
> Could someone help me in find out any of those things?
>
> Regards,
>




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