Network Protocol for Online Games by Michael Butler/Jennifer Louie/Jorge Pombar

The situation

• Players can’t be trusted, some just like to cheat.
• These cheaters have access to the encryption algorithm via the client executable version of the game.
• Is very important to prevent cheating because otherwise it can ruin the game for thousand of players.
• Ultimate goal is not make it 100% secure but really hard to cheat.

 

Packets

• Client and servers use packets to communicate between them.
• Packets have a header and a payload
• The header contains administrative information.
• The payload contains the actual data we want to communicate.

 

Checksums

• We want to detect any changes to packets.
• An easy way is to do a checksum.
• We do a checksum by combining all the bites in the packets.
• So the sender and receiver calculate the checksum of the packet it compares both and rejects the packets if they don’t match.

 

Packet replay

• Is when an attacker saves a valid packet in order to send it multiple times.
• This allows the cheater to perform game actions much faster than the game actually allows.
• Best solution against packet replay is for each packet to have some state information.
• This causes packets with identical payloads to have different bit patterns.
• It could be as simple as a number that increments but to make it harder to cheaters a random number is better.

 

Packet tampering Prevention

Problem:

• The meaning of packets can be determined based on their length regardless of encryption.
• This information can be used to figure out the packet protocol. Then a malicious user could attempt to filter, modify or craft packets.

Solution 1:

• We pad the data with a random amount of junk bits.
• The number of random bits are determined by a synchronized state machine that both the client and the server have.

 

Solution 2

• We XOR the payload with a random number of bits. The random number is determined by a synchronized state machine that both client and server have.
• Both sender and receiver will perform this process in order to send and read the packet payload.

 

Final Remarks

• The hardest problem to address is that the client has the entire encryption algorithm, so it can always be reversed engineered.
• So our ultimate goal isn’t to make our game 100% secure but make it really hard for a player to cheat.
  We can follow these general guidelines to make it harder:
• Remove all debugging information from any release to the public.
• Don’t isolate encryption and decryption algorithms in their own functions. This makes it too easy to detect. Instead combine them with some of the network code.
• Include good encryption in every client version of the game, even early betas.

 

ps.原本是个PPT，我图看着方便贴一起了。