A Systematic Review of Technical Defenses Against Software-Based Cheating in Online Multiplayer Games
Adwa Alangari, Ohoud Alharbi

TL;DR
This paper systematically reviews technical defenses against software-based cheating in online multiplayer games, analyzing various approaches for effectiveness, overhead, privacy, and scalability, highlighting trade-offs and ongoing challenges.
Contribution
It categorizes and evaluates existing anti-cheat methods, providing a comprehensive comparison and identifying key trade-offs and research gaps.
Findings
Kernel-level solutions are highly visible but pose privacy and stability risks.
Server-side methods are less intrusive but offer limited insight.
An ongoing arms race exists between cheat developers and anti-cheat defenses.
Abstract
This systematic literature review surveys technical defenses against software-based cheating in online multiplayer games. Categorizing existing approach-es into server-side detection, client-side anti-tamper, kernel-level anti-cheat drivers, and hardware-assisted TEEs. Each category is evaluated in terms of detection effectiveness, perfor-mance overhead, privacy im-pact, and scalability. The analy-sis highlights key trade-offs, particularly between the high visibility of kernel-level solutions and their privacy and stability risks, versus the low intrusive-ness but limited insight of server-side methods. Overall, the re-view emphasizes the ongoing arms race with cheaters and the need for robust, adversary-resistant anti-cheat designs.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Malware Detection Techniques · Security and Verification in Computing · Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies
