possibility of cheating

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mistersheik
Posts: 10
Joined: April 27th, 2010, 9:29 pm

possibility of cheating

Post by mistersheik »

I was hesitant about bringing this up, but someone on the forum mentioned that one star player's luck seemed to be too good in some replays. I'd like to offer an opinion about that.

Because the random number generator is synchronized between all players in the multiplayer, it's possible for someone to modify the code so that it tells you the outcome of a battle before you engage in it.

I thought of keeping this to myself so as not to spoil the game, but since I did come up with a solution, and since it's possible that someone is already exploiting this, I wanted to share.

Instead of having a synchronized random number generator, every machine in the game has a private random seed that only it knows: x_i. It sends a public version of that seed y_i=f(x_i) to everyone else. Now, suppose someone makes an attack. The random numbers are provided by the defending computer using its seed: x_i. After the attack is concluded, the defending computer sends the seed it used x_i to the attacking coputer, and the attacking computer checks to see that f(x_i) equals the y_i it received before the attack. This works as long as f is a function that is difficult to invert. Such functions exist in cryptography.
Yogibear
Retired Developer
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Joined: September 16th, 2005, 5:44 am
Location: Hamburg, Germany

Re: possibility of cheating

Post by Yogibear »

This has been solved with 1.8. For multiplayer, every attack requests a new seed from the mp server (which is transferred to all clients) and will calculate the numbers based on that. So you basically have to commit to an attack before knowing the resulting random numbers and there is no way to change them afterwards without others to notice.
Smart persons learn out of their mistakes, wise persons learn out of others mistakes!
mistersheik
Posts: 10
Joined: April 27th, 2010, 9:29 pm

Re: possibility of cheating

Post by mistersheik »

Awesome. Very well done.
joshudson
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Joined: January 17th, 2006, 8:04 pm
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Re: possibility of cheating

Post by joshudson »

We were making a joke of cheating on Isars Cross one game not too long ago (of course nobody was actually cheating).

Some things fall into its funny because it could be true. I do have an almost undetectable cheat available to me if I so wished.
CHKDSK has repaired bad sectors in CHKDSK.EXE
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