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