[quake3] non-cheatable game

[Chris Bunting]

Hello,

 Aside from PunkBuster or BattleEye, This is the only other anti-cheat 
program that I know of. It seems to have been created for quake 3 but it 
looks like it can be modified to work with Q3.

http://antiche.at/

Chris


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Hobbs" <mike at hobbshouse.org>
To: <quake3 at icculus.org>
Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 3:03 PM
Subject: Re: [quake3] non-cheatable game


>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,
>>
>