''Secure Referee Selection for Fair and Responsive Peer-to-Peer Gaming''
S. D. Webb
S. Soh
J. L. Trahan
Proc. 22nd ACM/IEEE/SCS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation
(PADS'08), pp. 63-71.
Abstract:
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.
This work was supported in part by
the National Science Foundation under grant number CCR-0310916.