Information security as a countermeasure against cheating in video games

Abstract

Most cheating in video games is possible due to information being accessible outside the intended frames of the game developer. The issue of protecting sensitive information have been handled in many areas outside of video games for a long time now. The goal of this paper is to review these information security solutions that are in use in more security concerned areas today and to potentially find transferable approaches that can help protect important and sensitive information in video games and that way help prevent cheating.

In this paper the current threat and approaches of cheating is investigated to find the most commonly used security breaches. Then potential ways to increase the security of these areas are reviewed in order to find transferable security measures. A promising approach using hardware assisted virtualization is presented, that by using the virtualization hypervisor will handle encryption and decryption of application memory as well as preforming security checks for interaction with the host operating system, This can potentially provide a safe environment that can be used for video games while maintaining the required performance.