Can a game be unhackable

I was playing an old game made on the Unity engine that many have called 'unhackable'. Many people have tried to create cheats for the game, but failed--now, someone has succeeded and the developer hasn't been able to find an answer in nearly a year. So I'm curious, is there actually a way to make games secure and unhackable? Games like League of Legends come close, but even that has had its times.

 

No.

 

Yes unhackable, if it runs on the server only. This is generally the way the industry is going, once internet quality is high enough.

 

Yes.

 

This assumes the server would be unhackable too.

 

What if unhackable doesn't exist.

 

It doesn't. That's the point.

 

Nope. It may not be "unhackable" but you can certainly prevent it upto some extent. This only works online.... So yeah.

 

What if online doesn't exist?

 

No. Everything is hackable with time.

 

What if time doesn't exist?

 

What if trolling doesn't exist?

 

Time doesn't exist. Our perception of time is a side effect of our universe having one dimension that is not symmetrically homogeneous.

But, still, in the four-dimensional space-time construct that we perceive as the universe every game will be hacked given sufficient translation along our universe's causality vector.

And you can trust me. I have a degree in Science.

 

Trolling does exist. It is a well documented psycho-sociological phenomenon.

 

Damn, outsmarted by Captain Science.
And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!

 

If our eyes don't exist, trolling doesn't.

 

That's deep bro.

 

It's possible, just whether or not it's feasible or not is the question.

 

Perception is reality.


You can trust me, I have a non-existent degree in Philosophy.

The worlds best pseudo-philosophy right here.

 

So you hack the server, which either runs on an existing operating system (all of which have vulnerabilities) or a custom written one (which won't have the years of security work that existing ones have). Even if everything under your control is perfect, unless you started literally everything from scratch there's going to be vulnerabilities.

Don't ask "can it be hacked?". Ask "how hard is it?" and/or "how long will it take?".

Making things "secure" is typically about making the cost of an attack significantly higher than the value of whatever you're protecting.

 

Yes.

Recipe for Unhackable Game

1. Unplug internet and wireless cards from computer.
2. Make game.
3. Place finished game and computer in safe.
4. Move safe to remote location, e.g. desert or if safe watertight deep ocean.
5. Bury or Sink safe.
6. Your game is now unhackable.

 

It is easier to implement a Report-Ban system than a protection system for multiplayer games.
Concerning single player games , let the players enjoy the game the way they want.

 

"Unhackable" is always just a temporary condition.

Build a better mousetrap and someone WILL build a better mouse.

 

We all know that any decent server has a single access terminal behind two security doors (the first with a six digit passcode and voice recognition and the second with an iris scan and double electronic security card). Let's not forget the room, which when the server admin is not in it, is protected by state of the art pressure plates, noise sensors, and heat sensors that can't raise more than a degree without setting off an alarm.

 

No. Calling something "unhackable" is just a goad to make people want to try - and they will succeed. It doesn't matter how good a programmer you are, someone, somewhere, is better by a long way.

Arowx is on the right lines, though using Spade v1.0 and Stihl Saw v2.1 will probably get through.

 

7. Don't tell about your game if someone asks about it. That may be construed as social engineering or trying to hack that game-idea from your brain.

8. Don't tell about how you made it. That may be construed as an enemy trying to get hints to re-implement your game-idea.

 

It needs to run in a language nobody can decipher

the voynich manuscript is close. 600 years and nobody has succeeded. (obviously not a game but an example of something that is too hard too crack)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

 

whoooa that book is CRAZY! lol voynich manuscript awesome!

and as far as games go, unless you like make your own computer and hardware and code from scratch, that no one else could or would be able to know...
, No

 

Wow. Now I understand why some of the scripts that get posted on Answers are so hard to figure out. ;-)

 

http://www.stephen-hart.net/programming/ook.html


OOK.NET language. Perhaps someone should port it to Unity and write a C# to OOK converter or JS to OOK converter.

Code (CSharp):

1. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
2. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook?
3. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
4. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook!
5. Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook.
6. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
7. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
8. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook.
9. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
10. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook.
11. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook.
12. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
13. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook.
14. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook!
15. Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook.
16. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
17. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook!
18. Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
19. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.
20. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook!
21. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook?
22. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook.
23. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook!
24. Ook! Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook!
25. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook. Ook.
26. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook.

ok? ok! Ok!

 

If you just put a "bottle neck" of fully custom data, for example if you have two Raspberry Pis with one connected via internet and using a more primitive data type like say I2C or Serial to get the data from the other Pi, but it is not connected to any network and thus can't be hacked(providing your coding is right, but it shouldn't be hard to be secure)

 

Yeah it is crazy. It facinates me and I often think of turning the drawings into a game cause the art is striking. (and obviously no copyright).

I like the whitespace language better, since you could hide inside your C# script.

 

da Vinci wrote that from recent analysis.. I forget where I read the evidence but they showed his coded sig written in several places. So even that has now been hacked.

 

i know this thread is older but i think its worth to wake it up, because cheating is a really BIG problem for the whole gaming industry, directly (rage DDOS ect) and indiirect (massive support costs, hate mail ect ect).

The technology for hackfree gaming is there , but it still takes 1 or 2 decades until our internet is full driven by lightspeed and datacenters are changed to what they really should be ,"application on demand" and "cloud" are the beginning of it , one of the pioneers imo is for example www.liquidsky.tv . with all running at the server but your input only useless bots or a laserpointer on your screen are possible, even a "coloraimbot" would never work proper.
Please get informed before you argue, thanks

 

Steps to make a game perfectly unhackable:
1. Make a game
2. Save all the files for that game onto an iPhone, delete all other copies and submerge all drives that the game files had touched in Aqua Regia until completely destroyed.
3. Encrypt the phone.
4. Lock the phone in the most secure safe you can find.
5. Throw it into an active volcano.
6. Tell no one about the games existance.

Personally, I don't think it's worth the expense.

 

it is, if you manage it first you probably get the Alan Touring Award and the mankind will never forget your name

 

But if someone found out about my efforts, that would defeat the purpose, because then they would know the game exists, and find a way to hack it.

You know an hour after someone found out it existed, there would be a bunch of asset flipping companies searching the world's volcanos for the remains of that phone.

 

you didnt read my post above , did you?
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/can-a-game-be-unhackable.256561/#post-2654712

On Clientside i agree there will be never something "unhackable" but if you just a thin client, then things are very very very and very secure if done right

 

This. Doing all computation on server and just sending the frame to a device would make it impossible to hack the game locally. But as others have pointed out, if the server is hacked, you could still hack the game. It wouldn't be anything like the kind of hacking you do right now in video games though.

I'm not sure I believe in this development though, as we're going towards VR and such tech strives towards minimal latency for each frame for the experience to be pleasant, and that simply isn't possible due to physics if the frame has to travel through network. That is, unless we come up with some kind of higher dimension transportation of data that doesn't need to travel through space.

 

Quantum Entanglement, but you would only be able to play if you received an entangled Qubit for the game!

 

Every security measure can be bypassed or cracked.

 

Actually there are security measures that are uncrackable or 'bypassable', but you probably don't have the security clearance to know about them.

 

The only way to

But I'm sure a random hacker somewhere in china knows about them, because they hacked them years ago

Unless it's on an 8 inch floppy drive in an undisclosed location, it can be hacked.

 

Some may only be feasible given sufficient time though.

 

Wrong.

Wrong.

 

I'm sorry, do you work for Lockheed Martin and know something we don't?

 

Are you suggesting that every single method of encryption has been broken the day it was released? Just as one example AES come out in 1998 but up until 2009 the attacks against it were only side-channel attacks on specific implementations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard#Security

 

What game was this that many were calling unhackable? I think it should be fairly obvious how difficult it is to write a "unhackable" game just by looking at many AAA titles that have experienced programmers who know how to write secure code almost all of them are still cracked and posted on warez sites.

 

Multiplayer games that use a fully authoritative server run the simulation completely on the server. By definition, without access to the server, if implemented correctly, the client can have no effect on server state that is invalid. Modern games that use this approach often use client prediction and only send inputs, which limit the surface area the client has access to on the server, and allows the server and client to process everything in a deterministic way since these inputs are sent at fixed intervals fundamental to maintaining a client state that is consistent with the server. Without client prediction things become much easier from an engineering perspective, but generally at a cost in terms of input response and game play experience.

There will always be bugs, especially at launch, in the API the client uses to communicate with the server, and potentially buggy implementations/design of server touch points can lead to exploitation by clever hackers. However, the important thing is that with a truely server authoritative architecture these holes can be patched up, most often with just a server patch. Most server auth games will also generally allow some level of client authority in certain situations, because sometimes it is simply easier and minimally/not dangerous to exploitive users. Bad design here can again lead to exploitation. These types of bugs often require both client/server patches as often it has its root in giving the client too much authority.

Of course, even with a server auth implementation, the client can always be hacked, allowing for the user to query the client's state of the world, much of which is often resident on the client machine, at least in his own area of interest. This can lead to stuff referred to as ESP or wallhacks, aimbots, etc. Typically this remediation here is very hard and almost always reactionary, typically only "keeps the honest people honest" and frankly a topic less interesting and a bit divorced from from traditional hacking discussions.

Finally, fully client authoritative games, which make up a vast, vast majority of games on the market, are wide open and completely hackable. Often they attempt to implement server side sanity checks on certain operations in an attempt to constrain the insanity that can occur, but since the server doesn't own the state of the clients, he simply cannot definitively know in all situations whether a client is doing something invalid. In these cases, there is a kind of a grey zone where the server simply has to allow the operation for risk of punishing legit players.

Lastly, many strategy games use a methodology called lockstep, which has a different approach to solving these problems.

 

No it can't.