[gameprogrammer] Re: Scoreboard functionality across internet

On Wed, 2006-11-22 at 00:29 -0800, Alan Wolfe wrote:
> that is a really neat technique.
> 
> that sure makes it computationally expensive to fake the high score

How about this. Every time the player scores a message is sent to the
server. The game keeps a sequence number that is incremented for each
message and sent along with the score information. The start of the
sequence number can be retrieved from the server at the start of each
game or it can be stored in the low order bits of an image file so it is
hard to find on the disk and is maintained and updated each time the
game is run. The server keeps track of the sequence number. The score
messages are encrypted based on the sequence number. The idea is to make
the sequence number very hard to fake. Plus, the server can not even
read messages with bad sequence numbers.

                Bob Pendleton

> 
> On 11/21/06, Dave Slutzkin <daveslutzkin@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Tue, 21 Nov 2006 18:29:55 -0800, "Alan Wolfe" <alan.wolfe@xxxxxxxxx>
> > said:
> > > Hey you guys,
> > >
> > > I'm thinking of trying to implement a global scoreboard for a game.
> > >
> > > The game itself is a standard desktop game where you have the exe and
> > > files needed on your computer (ie its not a web based game or flash or
> > > anything) and the scoreboard i want to reside on a web page.
> > >
> > > Doing the web and database thing isn't a problem but I was wondering,
> > > are there any techniques to make this process secure?
> >
> > You could send the server the entire run of the game - the start state
> > and every piece of input in between it and the end state.  The server
> > could then run through the game itself and generate the score that way.
> > This sounds like a lot of data but if stored efficiently and then
> > compressed it might be all right, depending on the application.
> >
> > It'd still be possible to hack this but much harder, cause each bit of
> > input affects the state after it and so changing one may actually
> > invalidate later pieces of input - at which point the server could throw
> > the log away.
> >
> > Dave.
> > --
> >  Dave Slutzkin
> >  Melbourne, Australia
> >  daveslutzkin@xxxxxxxxxxx
> >
> >
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> >
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