Secure peer-to-peer trading for multiplayer games

A fundamental aspect of many multiplayer online games is the ability to trade items between players. This might take the form of items that were found in the virtual environment or of purchased assets, but in either case, any multiplayer game that supports trading or exchanging items in the game must do so in a secure manner. We have developed a protocol to solve the problem of secure, peer-to-peer trading in games in which the primary concern is that items are exchanged fairly, and additionally that items are not duplicated. Our protocol enables one-way and two-way trades and can be extended to multi-item trades. We show that our protocol addresses the security threats which it might encounter, and then provide an analysis to demonstrate the scalability of our protocol.