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Server Based Slots of the Future
prostoalex writes "The slot machines of the future won't be dumb one-armed bandits anymore, CNet reports. New generation of slot machines, to be deployed in major Vegas casinos, will feature server-based gaming with games, new features and, most important, the odds being downloaded from a central server location, not determined by internal machine algorithm any more."
Some cynics here may doubt the security of the system, but I'm sure none of the gaming vendors will hide any Easter eggs in their proprietary code. After all, if one can make software work reliably for something as complicated as counting votes, surely a simple application like a few hundred different kinds of casino games should be child's play to secure.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Boy, when's the last time TFA's reporter has been to Las Vegas? My girlfriend and I had real trouble to find a machine that even took quarters, let alone being mechanical.
Ah, there we go! Just quickly change the odds behind the backs of the players so you can reek in more... and market it as "personalized" playing experience. There is no step two...
I won't comment on the moronic reference to DoD encryption "to make it safe"...
Hasn't it? Harrahs black jack tables are computerized. You can see a CAT-6 cable running out of a computer under the table... They are obviously all going to one server. I'm sure it's the same with the slots there, too.
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Official Slashdot Guide to Moderation
rev. 3 5/29/00
by Cmdr. Taco
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Could you plug your own cable in and pretend to be the server? Not that I want to face casino security, but it's an interesting scenario.
I am trolling
Hi, What about automatic day-trading in FX derivatives or equities with the collected monies of (say) each 100 players? In the short term this really would be pretty random, with the broker acting as "house" and guaranteed an income... Rgds Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
I'm guessing there won't be an external port on any of the machines with a label "insert server spoof machine interface cable here" so you would probably have to take apart the machine to access some kind of internal port, assuming it has any ports at all.
Unfortunately casino security would probably find attempting to dismantle the machine a rather suspect activity.
- Idiots,
- Cheaters, or
- MIT students.
Or perhaps I'm being redundant.I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
I don't see how this is anything new.
Odyssey makes machines that do this already (boot from a central server, and play the games the server hands to it) and the majority of slot machines that exist on the casino floor already have ethernet and share the odds distribution between them.
This keeps odds at 1:600, or whatever they need to be instead of NSlotmachines:600.
I have implemented one of these systems. Many of the newer slot machines have been getting results from a central database for at least a decade. The results typically are generated from a few days to a few weeks in advance, which lets the casino confirm the payout percentages before making the gameset go live.
The way to look at it though is that the Casino does not care if you win big. In fact, the casino likes big jackpots, the bigger the better, because they more than make up for in the the extra attention they get. More attention = More players = More dollars played
They win a certain percent of every dollar played. The more dollars that get played the more they win.
Ah, there we go! Just quickly change the odds behind the backs of the players so you can reek in more... and market it as "personalized" playing experience. There is no step two...
You can't do that, it is illegal, at least in Nevada.
If you would rad up on the subject a bit more, you would see the point of this change is that the casino can compute far in advance the results for every pull of the slot, so that they can know the payout percentages in advance. This way, they can schedule the big jackpots, for instance.
Main point is, they cannot change the odds of machines on the fly - the odds need to be posted.
Well, for one thing, it's a single point for security updates and monitoring. If the slots are basically dumb terminals, the software load can be re-installed regularly to help minimize the window of opportunity for injected code. If it's a normal client/server deal, then there can still be scans for software tampering. Given this is /. and that SuperSAS is an open gaming protocol, I think that the "many eyes" security concept they're using is very practical. We know the casinos will be more than willing to pay for expert programmers to review the code, and that more than one casino would want to have the code checked out (get your resumes ready!).
As for the monitoring the communications, the casinos could use the strongest proven encryption possible and change the keys weekly, daily, or even hourly because they own the entire system. Each machine could even have it's own key, separate of the others (assuming PKI like implementation, the server could reply with a unique key to each node as well). Most people forget that the point of encryption is that the information assumed have been intercepted by a third party, but won't be useful by the time it's cracked. If crackers get to the point they can crack the casino's keys in 1 day, it wouldn't matter if the keys are changed hourly. Before that happened, though, they'd have long been investigating a new algorithm
As for being vulnerable to an inside job, you're right. The hard shell always has a soft, squishy center. Thing is, that's something that will never change. The only thing for them to do is have audits in place to limit the ability for people to aquire the information or access to set up a job like that by themselves. If nothing else, they should be able to do an audit and figure out who was involved after the fact.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
I've seen that the usual slashdot crowd is a little lax on history. Here are a few tidbits that I know:
1. Gaming accounting systems started around 1978. It was a Bally that started it, I believe. Running on a PDP11 in the back room. Keeping meter, drop and win percentage histories as required by gaming control.
2. Slot machines have been hooked up since that time using plain serial lines. Most use a form of encryption for the amounts and ticket validation ids.
3. This server based gaming thing isn't new but its just now starting to get approvals from GLI and NGCB ( gaming commisions in the US. ) The hard part has always been getting a hard drive into the dumb terminal. My guess is they finally found a way around that. That way they could just download the paytables ( not the personality which is the hold percentage which is heavily regulated BTW ) and not all the graphics and game code.
I do know that the NGCB looks at trend analysis of payoff data to confirm hold % over a period of time.