A State Saturation Attack against Massively Multiplayer Online Videogames

Blake Bryant, Hossein Saiedian

2021

Abstract

Online videogames have enjoyed a recent surge in popularity due to increased work-from-home policies, the popularization of high-reward game tournaments, and the prospect of players earning decent wages from streaming online content. The viability of leveraging online gaming as a source of primary or supplemental income places higher stakes on the security and suitability of the network and underlying protocols used to transport game related data. A common technique used in videogames known as “animation canceling” has been used for decades to improve player performance in competitive game play. This paper reviews the potential impact of animation canceling in terms of network traffic generated and degradation to the player experience. The paper lays the conceptual groundwork for networked videogames by describing common network architectures that facilitates competitive videogame play. Finally, a AAA gaming title is selected as a case study, using the principles established within this paper, to evaluate the effects of animation canceling on competitive game play. This paper introduces a new term ”state saturation” to describe a potential lag-based attack that may be implemented via animation cancelling to starve client-server based networked videogame command messages and game a competetive edge during game play.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Bryant B. and Saiedian H. (2021). A State Saturation Attack against Massively Multiplayer Online Videogames.In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP, ISBN 978-989-758-491-6, pages 217-225. DOI: 10.5220/0010302002170225

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icissp21,
author={Blake Bryant and Hossein Saiedian},
title={A State Saturation Attack against Massively Multiplayer Online Videogames},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,},
year={2021},
pages={217-225},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010302002170225},
isbn={978-989-758-491-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,
TI - A State Saturation Attack against Massively Multiplayer Online Videogames
SN - 978-989-758-491-6
AU - Bryant B.
AU - Saiedian H.
PY - 2021
SP - 217
EP - 225
DO - 10.5220/0010302002170225