Entries Tagged "games"

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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

Cheating at Professional Bridge

Interesting article on detecting cheaters in professional bridge using big-data analysis.

Basically, a big part of the game is the communication of information between the partners. But only certain communications channels are permitted. Cheating involves partners sending secret signals to each other.

The results of this can be detected by analyzing lots of games the partners play. If they consistently make plays that should turn out badly based on the information they should know, but end up turning out well given the actual distribution of the cards, then we know that some sort of secret signaling is involved.

Posted on March 8, 2016 at 6:07 AM • View Comments

Detecting Betrayal in Diplomacy Games

Interesting research detecting betrayal in the game of Diplomacy by analyzing interplayer messages.

One harbinger was a shift in politeness. Players who were excessively polite in general were more likely to betray, and people who were suddenly more polite were more likely to become victims of betrayal, study coauthor and Cornell graduate student Vlad Niculae reported July 29 at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Beijing. Consider this exchange from one round:

    Germany: Can I suggest you move your armies east and then I will support you? Then next year you move [there] and dismantle Turkey. I will deal with England and France, you take out Italy.

    Austria: Sounds like a perfect plan! Happy to follow through. And­—thank you Bruder!

Austria’s next move was invading German territory. Bam! Betrayal.

An increase planning-related language by the soon-to-be victim also indicated impending betrayal, a signal that emerges a few rounds before the treachery ensues. And correspondence of soon-to-be betrayers had an uptick in positive sentiment in the lead-up to their breach.

Working from these linguistic cues, a computer program could peg future betrayal 57 percent of the time. That might not sound like much, but it was better than the accuracy of the human players, who never saw it coming. And remember that by definition, a betrayer conceals the intention to betray; the breach is unexpected (that whole trust thing). Given that inherent deceit, 57 percent isn’t so bad.

Back when I was in high school, I briefly published a postal Diplomacy zine.

Academic paper.

Posted on August 10, 2015 at 3:32 PM • View Comments

Doxing as an Attack

Those of you unfamiliar with hacker culture might need an explanation of “doxing.”

The word refers to the practice of publishing personal information about people without their consent. Usually it’s things like an address and phone number, but it can also be credit card details, medical information, private e-mails—­pretty much anything an assailant can get his hands on.

Doxing is not new; the term dates back to 2001 and the hacker group Anonymous. But it can be incredibly offensive. In 2014, several women were doxed by male gamers trying to intimidate them into keeping silent about sexism in computer games.

Companies can be doxed, too. In 2011, Anonymous doxed the technology firm HBGary Federal. In the past few weeks we’ve witnessed the ongoing doxing of Sony.

Everyone from political activists to hackers to government leaders has now learned how effective this attack is. Everyone from common individuals to corporate executives to government leaders now fears this will happen to them. And I believe this will change how we think about computing and the Internet.

This essay previously appeared on BetaBoston, who asked about a trend for 2015.

EDITED TO ADD (1/3): Slashdot thread.

Posted on January 2, 2015 at 7:21 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.