Design of a Cheat-Resistant P2P Online Gaming System

Since the huge success of online games and especially that of so called Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), the prevention of cheating has been a primary concern of game providers. This is also the main reason why Peer-To-Peer (P2P) architectures are not widely used in this area, although they could offer significant cost savings. Letting player nodes handle game-relevant logic or data means giving away control and opening up additional possibilities for cheaters. In this paper, the authors present a P2P architecture which provides countermeasures against cheats that are inherent to these systems.