A Windows-based Software Architecture for Protecting Online Games against Hackers

  • Bui The Luan
  • Nguyen Van Khanh

Abstract

We study the problem of protecting Windowsbased  online  games  against  hackers.  We  consider  an interaction  scenario  between  3  parties,  the  game producer,  the  game  distributor  and  the  game  player (client), where we aim to support the distributor to fight against cheater  clients  with minimum  cooperation from the game producer. For a protection solution, we propose a software architecture which introduces the specifically designed  moduleGameGuard.  Upon  being  played  in  the Client machine, the GameClient program simultaneously interacts  with GameGuard so  that  if  a  serious  hack  is attempted, it will be detected and then both modules will terminate.

We  support  the  game  distributors  with  a  general protection framework which is not dependent on specific games  and  also  only  needs  minimum  cooperation  from the  distant  game  producers.  Our  approach  is  powerful enough that we would defeat most kinds of attacks which are  based  on  hooking  Windows  APIs,  including  ones from memory, graphic or hardware attack categories.
Published
2014-10-28
Section
Regular Articles