Delay sensitive identity protection in peer-to-peer online gaming environments

Abstract

Peer-to-peer computing overcomes communication bottleneck problems associated with centralized game servers and provides an alternative mechanism to support massively multi-player online gaming (MMOG) applications. A potential security problem associated with this approach relates to player identity. In an MMOG, users from different parts of the network interact with each other in a virtual world. In a peer-to-peer model, these interactions happen directly between the peers and this leads to the IP addresses of peers being available in the network packets. Malicious users can extract the IP addresses of their opponents and the information can be used to gain unfair advantage by compromising ..