Re: cheating

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Dmitry Samoyloff wrote:
> 
> Hello!
> 
> Excuse me guys.
> Tell me please, what exactly you mean as you say about cheating?

Oh - Things like:

* Grabbing the sources for Mesa and hacking in a 'backdoor'
  way to force the graphics system into wireframe. This takes about a dozen
  lines of code and allows you to have X-ray vision on-command.  That could be
  useful for seeing if someone is hiding around the next corner!

* Get into the C standard library and speed up "game time" by hacking gettimeofday.
  Your game will think time is passing faster and you'll be able to run at
  superhuman speeds.

* Get into the Linux network code and spy into the data packets coming into the game.
  With care you should be able to generate a 'radar screen' that lets you see
  where the other players are, what weapons they are carrying, etc.

I'll leave the rest to your imagination.

You can do stuff like that without even having the sources to the
game you are playing.  If you have the game sources, you can cheat
in MUCH more creative ways.

Obviously this is only relevent to networked games.

You can think of (complicated) ways to prevent these attacks - but I bet I
can think of new ones faster than you can patch the holes!

But (as I said before) let's not get into this - it's been WELL discussed on
1e6 other mailing lists.

-- 
Steve Baker   HomeEmail: <sjbaker1@airmail.net>
              WorkEmail: <sjbaker@link.com>
              HomePage : http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
              Projects : http://plib.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxaqfh.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxkart.sourceforge.net
                         http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: linuxgames-unsubscribe@sunsite.auc.dk
For additional commands, e-mail: linuxgames-help@sunsite.auc.dk