Game Developers Cracking Down on Cheating

Hector73 writes "ZDNet has an article discussing a growing concern for the makers of on-line video games. Cheaters and trolls are making it harder for casual users and newbies to get hooked on the on-line versions of games. Considering that on-line gaming may become the major revenue source for game makers over the few years, maybe they will actually do something about it."

Comments

Re:A perfect world?

[btellier]

>Code needs to be written to self protect. Once an intrusion or a hack is detected, it determines the nature of the hack, and forbids the next attempt.

It is 100% impossible for a given program determine if it has been hacked if the person who is trying to hack it is the administrator/root user of the machine. Is this clear enough? You have control over everything the program sees because you can modify every portion of it. Watch:

int check_self() { // function which checks its current program for modification
// perform checks ...
if (we_passed) {
return TRUE;
}
else return FALSE;
}

int run() {

if (check_self()) { // we passed the check (TRUE)
continue();
}
else //We failed

In this situation the "run()" function calls the "check_self()" function to see if the current program is still OK. However all the hax0r would have to do would be to change a single byte, FALSE (0) to TRUE (1), in the program with a special editor and the program would appear to pass the self test, even though it didn't.

If we aren't the superuser on the system we can protect ourselves by not allowing the programs to be modified and preventing ordinary users from accessing their address space, like SUID/SGID binaries in UN*X or programs started by other users.