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Comment by shocks | Hacker News Reader

Very true, however I am not aware of a specification that, for example, makes it easy to check the scripts/resources that are being used are the correct ones. Of course any system to do this can be broken, but it strikes me a much bigger problem with Javascript in the browser than a binary.

One idea that's just crossed my mind is the idea of serving different Javascript to each client? It could be obfuscated uniquely every time someone loads the page in a detectable way. I,e you can serve IP x.x.x.x with obfuscation seed y and then you know to expect a certain behaviour. Variables and program flow can be changed to confuse nieve would be hackers, but important the structure of the network communication can be changed in a subtle way. Any hack scripts would need to counter for this which would make things far more complicated.

I wish my university term would be over so I can start hacking away on this idea! :)

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You will still fail to prevent cheaters using an approach like this one. Even a game that is only distributed as a binary but with no or few checks on the server for cheating will be compromised very fast. It only takes one person to figure out how to do it and then release a proof of concept.

It is, in fact, not a bigger problem if the code is readily readable. Someone with the technical chops to read the source code and figure out weaknesses that can be exploited for cheating wouldn't be stumped by a binary blob for very long. My usual approach when trying to figure out "cheats" for most such things is to bypass the client altogether and analyse the network traffic to figure out the underlying protocol. Then come up with a client that reproduces those(simple replay attacks at first to see what works and what doesn't) and as my understanding of what does what evolves make it more sophisticated and flexible.

Having your source code fully available to any would-be attacker will force you to not make the mistake of hoping that nobody figures out how things work to be able to attack you. It forces you to pay attention to server-side checks to enforce the constraints of your game(what? that guy just changed his position in a way that's way too fast? not possible!).

Very true, no security through obscurity. Anti-cheats should be just another category of development topics under game development. So you wanted to be a game developer...

The way you prevent cheating in a game like this is that the game itself runs on the server. The client side is merely showing a representation of the server state. If people want to edit the scripts to show an invalid state who cares. Granted latency becomes a huge challenge, but in a perfect world (no latency) having the scripts on the clients side and having people edit them isn't a big deal

Easily said, but the challenge is making absolutely triple damn sure that the game running on the server is bulletproof against malicious input by the client. It took years for early games like Diablo and Everquest to get it right in ignoring a client sending position updates to move a character faster than nominally allowed by the game logic. And that's the tip of the iceberg.

You also have the problem of hidden information. Most games have a fog of war or simply walls that should obscure some part of the game state. If this is sent to the client, somebody will expose that information: maphack. It's not at all a trivial problem to define and send only exactly the slices of the game state that the client should have access to.

And any game where timing matters is subject to auto-aim bots and other such cyborg-style assistance to the players. Bomberman is subject to this: imagine a browser plugin that automatically moves your character out of range of a bomb in the last few instants before it explodes.

The "fog of war" is actually really easy to do. And most games that use "fog of war" already have parts in place for this.

Checking client input is rather difficult, but it's no more difficult then developing the game itself. Just a lot of hassle and checking.

Even if you do all this stuff, people can still break it. Look at pretty much every game made. There are ways to cheat.

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