[quake3] non-cheatable game

[David Jackson]

This is untrue, on many levels.  It is a software engineering  
problem; admittedly, a very hefty one, but it can be done.

At it's very core, you have to be able to protect your program code  
and program data.  A good start would be to -not- use dynamically- 
linked libraries.

David Jackson

On May 14, 2007, at 2:03 PM, Mike Hobbs wrote:

> 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
>