SpotCheck: an efficient defense against information exposure cheats

• Authors: Sam Moffatt;Akshay Dua;Wu-chang Feng
• Venue: Proceedings of the 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games
• Year: 2011

A lot of hidden information is present in client programs of most existing online multi-player games. This hidden information is necessary for clients to render a player's view of the game. However, the same hidden information can be exploited by cheaters to gain an unfair advantage over other players. Eliminating hidden information from the game client comes at a significant cost to the server, since it must now send the data required to render a client's view on-demand. Consequently, the burden of tracking a player's view shifts from the client to the server, hindering scalability and degrading game performance. We propose SpotCheck, a more scalable approach for detecting information exposure cheats. The key idea is that servers still disseminate game state information on-demand, but clients retain the burden of tracking a player's view. After each move, clients must submit a descriptor pertaining to the player's view. The server then randomly chooses to validate the descriptor and sends back relevant game state information. Our experimental results show, that SpotCheck can reduce the server CPU overhead by as much as half when compared to the alternative, while still being an effective defense against information exposure cheats.