Entries Tagged "cheating"

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Fraud Detection in Pokémon Go

I play Pokémon Go. (There, I’ve admitted it.) One of the interesting aspects of the game I’ve been watching is how the game’s publisher, Niantic, deals with cheaters.

There are three basic types of cheating in Pokémon Go. The first is botting, where a computer plays the game instead of a person. The second is spoofing, which is faking GPS to convince the game that you’re somewhere you’re not. These two cheats are often used together—and you see the results in the many high-level accounts for sale on the Internet. The third type of cheating is the use of third-party apps like trackers to get extra information about the game.

None of this would matter if everyone played independently. The only reason any player cares about whether other players are cheating is that there is a group aspect of the game: gym battling. Everyone’s enjoyment of that part of the game is affected by cheaters who can pretend to be where they’re not, especially if they have lots of powerful Pokémon that they collected effortlessly.

Niantic has been trying to deal with this problem since the game debuted, mostly by banning accounts when it detects cheating. Its initial strategy was basic—algorithmically detecting impossibly fast travel between physical locations or super-human amounts of playing, and then banning those accounts—with limited success. The limiting factor in all of this is false positives. While Niantic wants to stop cheating, it doesn’t want to block or limit any legitimate players. This makes it a very difficult problem, and contributes to the balance in the attacker/defender arms race.

Recently, Niantic implemented two new anti-cheating measures. The first is machine learning to detect cheaters. About this, we know little. The second is to limit the functionality of cheating accounts rather than ban them outright, making it harder for cheaters to know when they’ve been discovered.

“This is may very well be the beginning of Niantic’s machine learning approach to active bot countering,” user Dronpes writes on The Silph Road subreddit. “If the parameters for a shadowban are constantly adjusted server-side, as they can now easily be, then Niantic’s machine learning engineers can train their detection (classification) algorithms in ever-improving, ever more aggressive ways, and botters will constantly be forced to re-evaluate what factors may be triggering the detection.”

One of the expected future features in the game is trading. Creating a market for rare or powerful Pokémon would add a huge additional financial incentive to cheat. Unless Niantic can effectively prevent botting and spoofing, it’s unlikely to implement that feature.

Cheating detection in virtual reality games is going to be a constant problem as these games become more popular, especially if there are ways to monetize the results of cheating. This means that cheater detection will continue to be a critical component of these games’ success. Anything Niantic learns in Pokémon Go will be useful in whatever games come next.

Mystic, level 39—if you must know.

And, yes, I know the game tracks works by tracking your location. I’m all right with that. As I repeatedly say, Internet privacy is all about trade-offs.

Posted on November 3, 2017 at 6:35 AM • View Comments

Boston Red Sox Caught Using Technology to Steal Signs

The Boston Red Sox admitted to eavesdropping on the communications channel between catcher and pitcher.

Stealing signs is believed to be particularly effective when there is a runner on second base who can both watch what hand signals the catcher is using to communicate with the pitcher and can easily relay to the batter any clues about what type of pitch may be coming. Such tactics are allowed as long as teams do not use any methods beyond their eyes. Binoculars and electronic devices are both prohibited.

In recent years, as cameras have proliferated in major league ballparks, teams have begun using the abundance of video to help them discern opponents’ signs, including the catcher’s signals to the pitcher. Some clubs have had clubhouse attendants quickly relay information to the dugout from the personnel monitoring video feeds.

But such information has to be rushed to the dugout on foot so it can be relayed to players on the field—a runner on second, the batter at the plate—while the information is still relevant. The Red Sox admitted to league investigators that they were able to significantly shorten this communications chain by using electronics. In what mimicked the rhythm of a double play, the information would rapidly go from video personnel to a trainer to the players.

This is ridiculous. The rules about what sorts of sign stealing are allowed and what sorts are not are arbitrary and unenforceable. My guess is that the only reason there aren’t more complaints is because everyone does it.

The Red Sox responded in kind on Tuesday, filing a complaint against the Yankees claiming that the team uses a camera from its YES television network exclusively to steal signs during games, an assertion the Yankees denied.

Boston’s mistake here was using a very conspicuous Apple Watch as a communications device. They need to learn to be more subtle, like everyone else.

Posted on September 22, 2017 at 6:21 AM • View Comments

Predicting a Slot Machine's PRNG

Wired is reporting on a new slot machine hack. A Russian group has reverse-engineered a particular brand of slot machine—from Austrian company Novomatic—and can simulate and predict the pseudo-random number generator.

The cell phones from Pechanga, combined with intelligence from investigations in Missouri and Europe, revealed key details. According to Willy Allison, a Las Vegas­-based casino security consultant who has been tracking the Russian scam for years, the operatives use their phones to record about two dozen spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, the St. Petersburg team transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate roughly 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button.

“The normal reaction time for a human is about a quarter of a second, which is why they do that,” says Allison, who is also the founder of the annual World Game Protection Conference. The timed spins are not always successful, but they result in far more payouts than a machine normally awards: Individual scammers typically win more than $10,000 per day. (Allison notes that those operatives try to keep their winnings on each machine to less than $1,000, to avoid arousing suspicion.) A four-person team working multiple casinos can earn upwards of $250,000 in a single week.

The easy solution is to use a random-number generator that accepts local entropy, like Fortuna. But there’s probably no way to easily reprogram those old machines.

Posted on February 8, 2017 at 6:48 AM • View Comments

Hacking Bridge-Hand Generation Software

Interesting:

Roughly three weeks later, there is a operation program available to crack ACBL hand records.

  • Given three consecutive boards, all the remaining boards for that session can be determined.
  • The program can be easily parallelized. This analysis can be finished while sessions are still running

this would permit the following type of attack:

  • A confederate watch boards 1-3 of the USBF team trials on vugraph
  • The confederate uses Amazon web services to crack all the rest of the boards for that session
  • The confederate texts the hands to a players smart phone
  • The player hits the head, whips out his smart phone, and …

Posted on September 16, 2016 at 12:12 PM • View Comments

Defeating a Tamper-Proof Bottle

Here’s an interesting case of doctored urine-test samples from the Sochi Olympics. Evidence points to someone defeating the tamper resistance of the bottles:

Berlinger bottles come in sets of two: one for the athlete’s “A” sample, which is tested at the Games, and the other for the “B” sample, which is used to corroborate a positive test of the A sample. Metal teeth in the B bottle’s cap lock in place, so it cannot be twisted off.

“The bottles are either destroyed or retain visible traces of tampering if any unauthorized attempt is made to open them,” Berlinger’s website says about the security of the bottles.

The only way to open the bottle, according to Berlinger, is to use a special machine sold by the company for about $2,000; it cracks the bottle’s cap in half, making it apparent that the sample has been touched.

Yet someone figured out how to open the bottles, swap out the liquid, and replace the caps without leaving any visible signs of tampering.

EDITED TO ADD: There’s a new article on how they did it.

In Room 124, Dr. Rodchenkov received the sealed bottles through the hole and handed them to a man who he believed was a Russian intelligence officer. The man took the bottles to a building nearby. Within a few hours, the bottles were returned with the caps loose and unbroken.

One commenter complained that I called the bottles “tamper-proof,” even though I used the more accurate phrase “tamper-resistance” in the post. Yes, that was sloppy.

Posted on May 16, 2016 at 6:03 AM • View Comments

Cheating in Bicycle Races with Tiny Hidden Motors

If doping weren’t enough, cyclists are cheating in races by hiding tiny motors in their bicycles. There are many detection techniques:

For its report, Stade 2 positioned a thermal imaging camera along the route of the Strade Bianche, an Italian professional men’s race in March held mostly on unpaved roads and featuring many steep climbs. The rear hub of one bicycle glowed with almost the same vivid orange-yellow thermal imprint of the riders’ legs. Engineers and antidoping experts interviewed by the TV program said the pattern could be explained only by heat generated by a motor. The rider was not named by the program and could not be identified from the thermal image.

[…]

Cycling’s equivalents of the Zapruder film are online videos that show unusual patterns of bike changes that precede or follow exceptional bursts of speed by riders. Other videos analyze riders’ hand movements for signs of switching on motors. Still other online analysts pore over crashes, looking for bikes on which the cranks keep turning after separation from the rider.

Unlike the thermal images, however, the videos have only implied that a motor was present.

In a statement, the cycling union, which commonly goes by its French initials, U.C.I., said it had tested and rejected thermal imaging.

“The U.C.I. has been testing for technological fraud for many years, and with the objective of increasing the efficiency of these tests, we have been trialling new methods of detection over the last year,” the governing body said. “We have looked at thermal imaging, X-ray and ultrasonic testing, but by far the most cost-effective, reliable and accurate method has proved to be magnetic resonance testing using software we have created in partnership with a company of specialist developers.”

Posted on April 22, 2016 at 6:22 AM • View Comments

Cheating in Marathon Running

Story of Julie Miller, who cheated in multiple triathlon races:

The difference between cheating in 1980 and cheating today is that it’s much harder to get away with now. What trips up contemporary cheaters, Empfield said, is their false assumption that the only thing they have to worry about is their timing chip, the device they wear that records their time at various points along a course.

But the use of additional technology ­ especially the ubiquitous course photos taken by spectators and professional photographers, which provide a wealth of information about athletes’ positions and times throughout a race ­ makes it difficult for people to cover their tracks after the fact.

“What these people don’t understand is that the photos contain so much data ­ they don’t know that this exists,” Empfield said of cheaters. “They think that if they hide in the bushes and re-emerge or take the chip off or whatever, they’re in the clear. But the problem is that people can now forensically recreate your race.”

Reminds me of this 2012 story about marathon cheating.

EDITED TO ADD (4/27): An update with proof of cheating.

Posted on April 14, 2016 at 6:44 AM • View Comments

Interesting Lottery Terminal Hack

It was a manipulation of the terminals.

The 5 Card Cash game was suspended in November after Connecticut Lottery and state Department of Consumer Protection officials noticed there were more winning tickets than the game’s parameters should have allowed. The game remains suspended.

An investigation determined that some lottery retailers were manipulating lottery machines to print more instant winner tickets and fewer losers….

[…]

An investigator for the Connecticut Lottery determined that terminal operators could slow down their lottery machines by requesting a number of database reports or by entering several requests for lottery game tickets. While those reports were being processed, the operator could enter sales for 5 Card Cash tickets. Before the tickets would print, however, the operator could see on a screen if the tickets were instant winners. If tickets were not winners, the operator could cancel the sale before the tickets printed.

Posted on March 25, 2016 at 6:31 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.