ONLINE Game Security: A Case Study of an MMO Strategy Game

Year 2020, Volume: 7 Issue: 2, 43 - 57, 25.07.2020

Ahmet Efe , Emre Önal

Abstract

Just as the Internet and the digital age are transforming life practices in every direction, the habits of playing games are taking its dominance with pervasive addiction while security concerns are alarming. Different terms are being used for the security issues of games in the literature like cheat, exploit, hack, attack. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games are joining the ranks of software popular enough to be bombarded by attacks. In this study, we explore the security issues of an online game and its protection measures on a sample game. We will use a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) strategy game that we have been developing as our case study, which utilizes different aspects of MMO concept that contains many security issues. We tried to point out the vulnerable points of MMO games and provide sufficient solutions to these problems by using an MMO strategy game as in our case study.

Keywords

Online Games, Game Security, Risks and Threats, Cyber Game

References

• [1] Volk, P. (2016, September 13) League of Legends Now Boasts over 100 Million Monthly Active Players Worldwide. Retrieved from https://www.riftherald.com.
• [2] PC online game market value worldwide from 2011 to 2019 (in billion U.S. dollars) (2016) Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/292516/pc-online-game-market-value-worldwide/.
• [3] Yan, J., "Security design in online games," 19th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 2003. Proceedings., pp. 286-295 (2003).
• [4] Jiankun, H. and Zambetta, F. “Security issues in massive online games”, Security and Communication Networks, pp. 83-92 (2008).
• [5] Woo, J. and Kim, H. K., “Survey and research direction on online game security”. In Proceedings of the Workshop at SIGGRAPH Asia (WASA '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 19-25 (2012).
• [6] Sarıca, M. (2011) “Hackerlerin Gözünden Flash uygulamaları” https://www.mertsarica.com/hackerlarin-gozunden-flash-uygulamalari/ .
• [7] Ryan, M-L., “Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory” SubStance, 28(89), 110-137 (1999).
• [8] Çatak, G. “Bilgisayar Oyunlarında Mimarinin Kullanımı”, Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Y.T.Ü. İstanbul. (2003).
• [9] Hoglund, G. and McGraw, G. “Exploiting Software: How to Break Code”, Addison-Wesley Professional, (2004).
• [10] Hoglund, G. and McGraw, G., “Exploiting Online Games”, Addison-Wesley Professional, (2008).
• [11] Muttick, I., “Securing Virtual Worlds against Real Attacks”, McAfee, (2008).
• [12] Bono, S., Caselden, D., Lansau G., Miller, C., “Reducing the Attack Surface in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games”, Published by the IEEE Computer society, (2009).
• [13] Anderie, L., “Game hacking: from pirated copies to cybercrime game hack Quick Guide Game”, Hacking, Blockchain and Monetization pp 1-21 (2020).