A State Saturation Attack against Massively Multiplayer Online Videogames

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.