Cheating & open source, revisited

by Aardappel_ on 04/27/2005 07:54, 218 messages, last message: 06/16/2006 17:23, 188305 views, last view: 11/01/2024 15:26

As you all know, cheating is a problem for Cube being Open Source. Noone likes the current solution of the incompatible binaries, and I am getting to the point where I see the usefulness of having other people continue to work on Cube whenever I don't have the time.. currently that is problematic and would be much easier if the source to the official game could be truely open.

Multiplayer continues to be an important aspect of Cube, so we can't ignore cheating and simply hope that people won't change 1 line of code to enable god mode or permanent octa-damage, because they will (tell me something about human nature and the people on the interweb).

The solution can't come in the form of "cheat protection", this simply isn't possible with the current cube, and even if the entire gameplay code was moved serverside, is still fragile. Don't even suggest it... make sure you understand the nature of the client/server gameplay code before commenting.

The solution for Cube I feel has to be a social one. As you may remember, I designed a solution before:
http://wouter.fov120.com/rants/trusted_communities.html
The problem with this particular design is that it is too complex to set up, and too centralized. I would like to come up with a solution that is simpler, less implementation work, and can work with any group of people, centralized or not.

This is the idea I came up with sofar:

Every player that wants to play in a cheat free environment, can use a command in Cube to generate a set of key files. A key file is simply a file of, say, 10000 random bytes. The player then hands out these files to players he trusts... or rather, players he wants to trust him. (why there are multiple files will become clear later).

A server can either be in untrusted mode (default, works as before), or trusted mode. It can be set to trusted mode by the server admin, or voted by the players until the server empties. It will show up in the server browser as trusted.

If a player A & B connect to a trusted server, A looks up B's nickname in his folder of key files. If he finds a corresponding key file, he chooses a few random file offsets and reads the bytes there. It now sends a packet to B asking it for the bytes at those offsets. If B really is B, it can simply read its own keyfile and return the values. A now compares the values, and if they match, it sends a "I trust B" packet to the server. The hud shows which clients you trust, and for each client how many clients trust him in total. You are now sure that B really is who he says he is.

On a trusted server, people that after exchange of trust packets have gained no trust, can be booted from the server automatically. This allows you to play games with trusted people in your community, and have external people unable to be join the game.

asking for random offsets guarantees that untrustworthy clients or even servers never get to sniff keys. "Trust" is evaluated locally and for you only, so can't be spoofed.

The one problem would be handing your key file to someone who later turns out to be untrustworthy. This person could now impersonate you and appear to be you to all your trusted friends. Hence the multiple key files, so you can give a different key file to different people (or groups of people). That way, if the person "goes bad", he can't impersonate you towards your friends, as he doesn't have the keyfile your friends have.

The system is not perfect of course. You can still have 2 cheaters join together and trust eachother. Luckily cheaters hardly ever come in groups, and there are more complicated ways to protect even against this.

The biggest issue is the inconvenience of having to exchange key files, and especially to require new players to find existing players on forums/irc before they can sensibly play. I think it is bearable though, as you only need to do it once, and Cube multiplayer is a fairly closed community. And if servers are by default untrusted, you can give newcomers the benefit of the doubt until they behave suspicious.

What do you all think? Please think it through thoroughly before commenting (I am talking to you, Jean Pierre! :). I am especially interested in "holes" in this system, i.e. ways that cheaters could abuse it if they really wanted to.

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#84: ..

by CC machine on 06/04/2005 22:08

server side rendering?? that would only work on super high bandwidths and lots of poeple dont have that :(

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#85: Re: ..

by >driAn<. on 06/04/2005 22:13, refers to #84

CC: that was a joke, its impossible, same as your idea.

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#86: Re: server tracking

by Pxtl on 06/05/2005 00:31, refers to #80

Not that simple. Very often, in normal Cube, you can kill a player in such a way that, because of the ping differences, the other player never had line-of-sight with you (although you had line-of-sight with him).

Eg. you and player have a wall between you so you can't see each other. He jumps, and by coincidence you jump a quarter second later. Assume quarter second ping. From his perspective, you jumped a half second after him, and he never saw you. From your perspective, you jumped at the same time, and you shot him in the face.

Now, the problem - the server saw things 1/8th of a second, because the server has half-ping lag. So to the server, you never saw each other. So how does the server know you didn't wallhack the collision detection and cheat? I guess the client could send "I shot player X from position Y at position Z" - which is a heftier message than "I shot X"... the server could confirm "Yes, indeed, guy 1 was at X and guy 2 was at Z recently, so that shot is possible" - but that would involve some nasty searching through recent history.

And it still doesn't stop aimbots. All it prevents is impossible cheat shots. I think the main thing that the server can do is track health/status (preventing invulnerability) and track movement to avoid teleportation or flight tricks. Invulnerability is arguably the scariest cheat besides aimbots (which are pretty much impossible to prevent), because it's very difficult to detect - and that can easily be handled by moving damage-counting server-side, which wouldn't make for more messaging either way.

The hard part will be preventing using the power of Cube's client-side damage handling, which basically lets the player say "do X damage to Y" without even shooting.

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#87: Re: ..

by CC_machine on 06/05/2005 10:56, refers to #85

oh ok i thought you were being serious

though server side rendering would solve the problem though, if you could squash the images so that they would fit down low bandwidths

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#88: ..

by >driAn<. on 06/05/2005 11:45

CC_machine:
xD forget it, thats not even possible in a LAN.

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#89: Re: Lightweight server-side cheat detection

by Pxtl on 06/05/2005 19:31, refers to #89

I would avoid having the server invalidate race-condition-based kills. By the logic of Cube's networking, that was a fair and successful shot. I would suggest a validation where you simply check that yes, at a point in recent history the shooter was where the shot came from, the shootee was where the shot hit, and the shot does not pass through any walls. It would have to be a full search through about a ping of history for shooter and shootee. This would accomodate the very loose timing used in Cube. If these 3 conditions are true, it's a fair shot. Whether these events happened at the same time would be ignored. It would be looser than a real check, but would never invalidate successful shots from the client without cheating. However, it would also be more computationally expensive - you'd have to search through the two players' recent-movement buffers to check for their existence at the origin and target positions of the shot. Also, you'd have to add the additional information of "where the target was when I hit him" to the netcode sent by the shooting player. In the end, it would still make it very risky to cheat-kill a man through walls (youd have to see him very recently, or he'd have to see you). Not a perfect protection, but something.

Of course, that fix only stops the shoot-through-walls problems. There are still other concerns - timing cheats (screwing with running speed, rate-of-fire), movement cheats (flight/teleportation), inventory cheats, and health cheats. The last two are easy, but the first two are tricky to fix.

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#90: ..

by >driAn<. on 06/05/2005 20:22

I have a question, did you guys ever read the cube netcode? It seems to me you didn't or you didn't read it carefully enough.
Its imho not worth to implement any of those 'cheat-protection' checks, because there are 1000 other ways to confuse the game.

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#91: ..

by remouk= on 06/10/2005 22:20

I don't understand why don't you want to keep Cube's current system : allowing only the official stable binary to play multiplayer. It isn't as restrictive as you seem to think.

Letting players connecting with custom binaries allows cheating. The current solution does NOT. Also, it may prevent bugs and (maybe) hacking attemps. At last, waiting for the binary isn't that annoying, while a two-month release (more or less) seems enough.

I've always been thinking you finded the very best solution with Cube, why changing this ?

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#92: Re: ..

by Aardappel_ on 06/11/2005 00:14, refers to #91

it is a solution, but really kinda shakey. The problem with "official binaries" is that you have to change things about them (like the protocol), and this really makes the whole cycle of working on it with multiple people and making releases a lot more involved. Right now, I can make a sauer release in 10 minutes, a cube release takes me days (collecting the right binaries from people etc). It also assumes a small core of "trusted" developers etc.. its messy.

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#93: Re: ..

by remouk= on 06/11/2005 10:09, refers to #92

I didn't thought it tooks you so long to make a Cube release. Well, I hope you'll find a nice solution (personnally I haven't). ;)

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#94: Simple Idea

by HopFrog on 06/11/2005 16:00

I just had a very simple but potentially effective idea. Here goes...

Earlier in the discussion, people were talking about trusted/untrusted clients. But what if we had a system of modified/unmodified clients where the server administrator and possibly other players had some way of knowing whether the player in question was using a modified binary or an unmodified one? Servers already have this capability, the only question is what to do with it as an alternative to simply preventing connections.

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#95: Re: Simple Idea

by jean pierre on 06/11/2005 16:06, refers to #94

Yeah yeah and Aard will make it in Sauer.

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#96: Re: Lightweight server-side cheat detection

by quirk on 06/11/2005 17:17, refers to #91

"Defensive running-speed cheats are harder to handle --- I don't currently see a lightweight solution there."

Could you just have the server store the last position of every player and the time that they were there and when you receive an update from that player, check if the distance moved is greater than the distance they should have been able to move in that time?

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#97: Re: Lightweight server-side cheat detection

by eihrul on 06/11/2005 17:31, refers to #96

That wouldn't work: think about a cheat that let you run through walls.

But anyway, ANY technical solution is doomed to failure, short of a dumb client or maybe having a magical compiler that actually verified all your sources were unmodified when compiling them or DRM or voodoo.

That would be the reason why Aardappel wants a social solution to the problem.

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#98: Re: Lightweight server-side cheat detection

by quirk on 06/11/2005 18:06, refers to #97

Did I say it would work on a cheat that would let you run through walls?

Any technical solution *that relies on the client doing any sort of checking* is doomed to failure. The only technical cheat prevention that is plausible has to be done by the server and the only thing it can do is sanity checking on the data that the clients send it. This won't catch all cheats (aimbots, hall hacks) but it will catch some.

As far as the social solution goes, I think its a good idea. Someone suggested that morons might trust each other to increase their status. I would suggest that trust given by a highly trusted person is worth more than someone trusted by less people.

I think the only suggestion I would make to aards suggestion (if being decentralised is really an issue) would be to have a pulic and private key setup but in reverse, only you can send messages from you but anyone can decrypt them, in effect, you keep the public key private and tell everyone your private key. Each player is known by the key that they give out and each player keeps a list of who they trust.

There may be a small (large) flaw in this, in a public-key system can the public key be generated from the private key?

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#99: other projects

by Sparr on 06/11/2005 18:06

has anyone put any research into what bzflag does to prevent cheating? 10+ years of open source online competetive gaming, they must be doing something right.

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#100: Re: ..

by quirk on 06/11/2005 18:08, refers to #98

That fits in with what I said, to spoof a location but then caiam a hit from where they're really standing, at some point they have to 'jump' the server sees this and points the shadowy finger of doom...

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#101: Re: other projects

by quirk on 06/11/2005 18:11, refers to #99

From the FAQ...

"Yeah, unfortunately. Because of the open nature of BZFlag, its not too difficult for someone with programming experience to create a cheat client. At the moment the best solution is to find the server admin or just change servers when a cheater shows up."

I guess its not such a fast paced game, eg, unless you have the laser, you can't use an aimbot and unless you are bouncing off three walls its pretty easy to aim at a stationary target anyway.

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#102: Re: ..

by quirk on 06/11/2005 19:39, refers to #102

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear, that was part of my response to aards "social solution" as opposed to a technical one.

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#103: Re: ..

by HopFrog on 06/11/2005 23:39, refers to #96

On the contrary Morgaine, I think you're missing the point of what I said. I fully recognize that many clients will be compiled for various reasons, such as platform ports, editing features, etc.

All I'm saying is that the information regarding whether they've done so should be available to the server admins (or possibly players, but I don't know if I like that idea because mob rule can be a nasty thing), because I'd imagine that most users use a stock binary while a minority uses custom compiles.

If that presumption is in fact the case, then a basic code-and-compile cheater (which along with a couple other things is probably the majority of cube cheaters, another presumption) would at least be visible because they'd report with an "unofficial" binary were that information looked into by a server admin, though they would still be able to play without barriers.

Maybe I didn't make my idea clear enough initially, it certainly wouldn't be the first time that's happened. It just seems like, at least for a possible patchwork solution in the short-term while work is done on a larger one, that this would provide a quick and dirty solution to many problems while not excluding custom compiled binaries from gaming fun. :)

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