Secure referee selection for fair and responsive peer to peer gaming

Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures for Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) provide better scalability than Client/Server (C/S); however, they increase the possibility of cheating. Recently proposed P2P protocols use trusted referees that simulate/validate the game to provide security equivalent...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Webb, Steven, Soh, Sieteng, Trahan, J.L.
Other Authors: Workshop on Parallel
Format: Conference Paper
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society 2008
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/8793
Description
Summary:Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures for Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) provide better scalability than Client/Server (C/S); however, they increase the possibility of cheating. Recently proposed P2P protocols use trusted referees that simulate/validate the game to provide security equivalent to C/S. When selecting referees from un-trusted peers, selecting non-colluding referees becomes critical. Further, referees should be selected such that the range and length of delays to players is minimised (maximising game fairness and responsiveness). In this paper we formally define the referee selection problem and propose two secure referee selection algorithms, SRS-1 and SRS-2, to solve it. Both algorithms ensure the probability of corrupt referees controlling a zone/region is below a pre-defined limit, while attempting to maximise responsiveness and fairness. The trade-off between responsiveness and fairness is adjustable for both algorithms. Simulations show the effectiveness of our algorithms in two different scenarios.