Cheating in Multiplayer Online Games: a Dataset
This dataset addresses the lack of representative labeled data for detecting network-based cheats in multiplayer online games, a problem for game developers and security researchers.
The authors created the first dataset containing logs of network flow disruption cheats in multiplayer online games, alongside common cheats like aimbots and wallhacks, to enable development of cheating detection mechanisms.
Cheating poses a significant threat to the Multiplayer Online Games (MOG) industry by degrading player satisfaction and undermining the fairness in competitive gaming. Despite efforts to develop mitigation techniques, cheating remains difficult to detect and prevent in practice. In particular, a class of cheats based on network flow disruption remains unsolvable. To find out how to detect such attacks we need access to representative labelled data. However, no such dataset exists. To address this gap, we leverage an experimental framework that combines a multiplayer online game with a plug-in capable of both reproducing cheating attacks and collecting logs at two levels: network and application-layer. This paper presents a dataset compiling records of game sessions played by both real players and automated game clients, with cheating actions explicitly logged. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset that provides logs of network flow disruption cheats. While it includes such network-based cheats, it is not limited to them and also contains records of more commonly studied cheats, such as aimbots and wallhacks. This dataset can be used by researchers in academia and industry seeking to develop cheating detection mechanisms for online games. Furthermore, it is designed to be evolutive and can be enriched by others creating their own data traces with the proposed framework.