A peer auditing scheme for cheat elimination in MMOGs

Although much of the research into massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) focuses on scalability concerns, other issues such as the existence of cheating have an equally large practical impact on game success. Cheat prevention itself is usually addressed through the use of proprietary, ad-hoc or manual methods, combined with a strong centralized authority as found in a straightforward client/server network model. To improve scalability, however, the use of more extensible, yet less secure, peer-to-peer (P2P) models has become an attractive game design option. Here we present the IRS hybrid game model that efficiently incorporates a centralized authority into a P2P setting for purposes of controlling and eliminating game cheaters. Analysis of our design shows that with any reasonable parametrization malicious clients are purged extremely quickly and with minimal impact on non-cheating clients, while still ensuring continued benefit and scalability from distributed computations. Cheating has a serious impact on the viability of multiplayer games, and our results illustrate the possibility of a system in which scalability and security coexist.