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No. It is possible to ensure that people don't cheat even with FOSS; signing and encryption make it possible to set up a nice relatively-difficult barrier to ch

No. It is possible to ensure that people don't cheat even with FOSS; signing and encryption make it possible to set up a nice relatively-difficult barrier to cheating. There are dozens of parallel projects that demonstrate this; perhaps the most obvious is Bitcoin. There are breakins with Bitcoin, but the threshold is very high, and it's pretty clear that only the most intelligent and savvy attackers make off with cash. In general, people sometimes ask this question about FOSS and security. Isn't FOSS bad for security, they say, since attackers can look at your code and find the holes so they can break in? What this assumes is that the holes are inevitable and obvious, and all anyone needs to break in is find them. It turns out that this isn't true, as many security-sensitive open source projects from OpenBSD to Mozilla Firefox have demonstrated. Security holes shouldn't exist; help from the community to prevent this is key. The hope that code will be more secure if we only keep it secret - otherwise known as "security through obscurity" - is a pipe dream.

ced 14y ago
No. It is possible to ensure that people don't cheat even with FOSS; signing and encryption make it possible to set up a nice relatively-difficult barrier to cheating. How would that work? If I have the source code of Starcraft, I can turn on the "Make the whole map visible" variable, and there's nothing whatsoever that encryption can do to prevent that. With closed-source, as far as I know, Blizzard's constant patching makes cheating relatively uncommon on their own servers.
- replax 14y ago
  Your Starcraft example is flawed, because Starcraft is NON OSS. Therefore, they chose other means of cheating prevention. You might argue that it is security by obscurity but it is working more or less to a certain extend. I have an example of OSS software with yet no cheater. Check out xonotic (www.xonotic.org), a heavily modified quake based shooter. They partly implement anti-cheat functionality by more or less shifting tasks from the client side to the server side, making e.g. wallhacks impossible. Also they use encryption for certain packages to prevent them from being tapered with. Aimbots are another thing, but I have yet to see one. I didn't really dig into the security features though, that is just what I picked up by casually browsing the forums...

ced 14y ago

No. It is possible to ensure that people don't cheat even with FOSS; signing and encryption make it possible to set up a nice relatively-difficult barrier to cheating. How would that work? If I have the source code of Starcraft, I can turn on the "Make the whole map visible" variable, and there's nothing whatsoever that encryption can do to prevent that. With closed-source, as far as I know, Blizzard's constant patching makes cheating relatively uncommon on their own servers.

replax 14y ago
Your Starcraft example is flawed, because Starcraft is NON OSS. Therefore, they chose other means of cheating prevention. You might argue that it is security by obscurity but it is working more or less to a certain extend. I have an example of OSS software with yet no cheater. Check out xonotic (www.xonotic.org), a heavily modified quake based shooter. They partly implement anti-cheat functionality by more or less shifting tasks from the client side to the server side, making e.g. wallhacks impossible. Also they use encryption for certain packages to prevent them from being tapered with. Aimbots are another thing, but I have yet to see one. I didn't really dig into the security features though, that is just what I picked up by casually browsing the forums...