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

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 their opponents´ computers. The well known approach to this problem is the use of anonymizing networks (onion routing and mixing), that anonymize the sender and the destination IP addresses from the peers along a path. However this approach introduces significant delays which are not desirable in MMOG applications. This paper proposes the use of a secret shared key to reduce computational delay and also provides a theoretical framework for trading off the strength of anonymity for reduced delay with respect to classes of interactions in the MMOG. The results suggest that appropriately low delays can be achieved with small reductions in anonymity strength.