RACS: A Referee Anti-Cheat Scheme for P2P Gaming

Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures provide better scalability than Client/Server (C/S) for Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG); however, they increase the possibility of cheating. Existing P2P cheat solutions only prevent protocol level cheats, ignoring two prevalent forms of cheating: information exposure (IE) and invalid commands (IC). This paper proposes the Referee Anti Cheat Scheme (RACS), a hybrid between P2P and C/S. As in P2P, RACS allows peers to exchange updates directly, improving its scalability. However, similar to the server in C/S, the referee in RACS has authority over the game state, providing cheat resistance equal to that in C/S. This paper describes how RACS prevents cheating ‐ including IE and IC. Our simulation and analysis show that the average bandwidth and delay in RACS is lower than that in P2P and C/S. This paper also includes a case study of integrating RACS with a commercial network game architecture.