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User identification based on game-play activity patterns

Published: 19 September 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Account hijacking is considered one of the most serious security problems in online games. A hijacker normally takes away valuable virtual items from the stolen accounts, and trades those items for real money. Even though account hijacking is not uncommon, there is currently no general solutions to determine whether an account has been hijacked. The game company is not aware of a hijack unless it is reported by the victim. However, it is usually too late---usually a hijacker already took away anything valuable when a user finds that his/her account has been stolen.
In this paper, we propose a new biometric for human identification based on users' game-play activities. Our main summary are two-fold: 1) we show that the idle time distribution is a representative feature of game players; 2) we propose the RET scheme, which is based on the KullbackLeibler divergence between idle time distributions, for user identification. Our evaluations shows that the RET scheme achieves higher than 90% accuracy with a 20-minute detection time given a 200-minute history size.

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cover image ACM Conferences
NetGames '07: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
September 2007
138 pages
ISBN:9780980446005
DOI:10.1145/1326257
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 19 September 2007

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Author Tags

  1. Kullback-Leibler divergence
  2. account hijacking
  3. biometrical signatures
  4. online games
  5. user behavior

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  • (2022)Justice League: Time-series Game Player Pattern Detection to Discover Rank-Skill Mismatch2022 IEEE International Conference on Agents (ICA)10.1109/ICA55837.2022.00014(42-47)Online publication date: Nov-2022
  • (2022)Cheating and Detection Method in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game: Systematic Literature ReviewIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2022.317211010(49050-49063)Online publication date: 2022
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