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Steven Davis

Protecting Games: A Security Handbook for Game Developers and Publishers 1st Edition

by Steven Davis (Author)

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Security measures are a critical piece of the game development process because they not only affect the player's ability to safely access and enjoy a game but a publisher's ability to profit from it. Protecting Games: A Security Handbook for Game Developers and Publishers provides IT and game security professionals with the solutions and tools they need to solve numerous game security problems, and an understanding of security principles that can be applied to game projects to prevent security issues. The book covers longstanding issues such as piracy and cheating and also new concerns like gambling, privacy, and protecting children. Security issues are addressed at the technical, business, operational, and design levels, with both technical and non-technical countermeasures and solutions discussed. And case studies are presented as realworld examples of the types of security concerns games and game developers face. You can easily jump to the key topics that are of interest to you, or work your way through the book. Protecting Games: A Security Handbook for Game Developers and Publishers makes understanding and resolving game security issues less intimidating, and provides practical security solutions that can be applied right away.

ISBN-10

1584506709
ISBN-13

978-1584506706
Edition

1st
Publisher

Cengage Learning
Publication date

January 8, 2009
Language

English
Dimensions

7.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches
Print length

416 pages
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mr. Davis is the CEO of IT GlobalSecure, designer of the SecurePlay game security software package, and author of the PlayNoEvil (http://www.playnoevil.com/) game security blog. He has over 20 years of security engineering experience. He worked at the US National Security Agency, CSC, SAIC, and Bell Atlantic on a wide range of commercial and government projects. He consults, speaks, and writes regularly on security topics around the world.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cengage Learning; 1st edition (January 8, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1584506709
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1584506706
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.85 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,273,885 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #229 in CompTIA Certification Guides
- #626 in Computer Graphics
- #1,606 in Game Programming

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Steven Davis

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Steven Davis has over 20 years of IT and IT security expertise and has focused on the security issues of the gaming industry for more than a decade. He advises game companies, governments, and regulators around the world. Mr. Davis has written numerous papers and speaks at conferences on all aspects of game security. He is the author of the book "Protecting Games" and the game security and industry blog, PlayNoEvil (http://www.playnoevil.com/). Mr. Davis has international patents on game security and IT security techniques, most notably the anti-cheating protocols that underlie the SecurePlay (http://www.secureplay.com) anti-cheating library. He has designed several games including DiceHoldem (http://www.diceholdem.com) and acts as a design consultant. He is currently the CEO of IT GlobalSecure (http://www.itglobalsecure.com) which develops game security products and provides game security, IT security, and game design and evaluation services. Mr. Davis' expertise includes security leadership positions at the US National Security Agency (NSA), CSC, Bell Atlantic (now Verizon), and SAIC. He has extensive cryptographic and key management design experience including work on Nuclear Command and Control systems, the Electronic Key Management System, and numerous other commercial and government projects. Mr. Davis has a BA in Mathematics from UC Berkeley and a Masters Degree in Security Policy Studies from George Washington University.

Customer reviews

5 out of 5

3 global ratings

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Fimbul

This book is amazing! Definitely the best resource out there for protecting ...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 4, 2014

Verified Purchase

This book is amazing! Definitely the best resource out there for protecting games, both from technical and design standpoints. The time it would take to learn everything listed in the book using free resources available on the internet would be immense, and some information - such as how to properly deal with gold farmers - would have to be learned almost by trial and error.

The book also deals with some eye-opening facts, such as how terrorists are using game communication tools to avoid the NSA, and how to deal with that problem.

Overall the only issue I found with this book is that it's from 2009, and the gaming landscape has changed a lot since then, with mobiles and free-to-play now becoming more prevalent than the traditional formats like MMORPG and match-based multiplayer. I'm not going to withhold a star from it due to this, because it's no-one's fault: the book was extremely comprehensive for its time and the advice it does contain is as relevant as ever (that is, the only fault is that it omits some new issues, but everything it has is still spot-on).

I'm eagerly awaiting a second edition!

Helpful

PSP

Forewarned is Forearmed

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 9, 2009

With the arrival of online gambling, massively multiplayer games and services like XBox Live come a much larger audience and a widening demographic scope. These players have helped turn the game industry into a money-making behemoth. As large and popular as this industry has become it has done a surprisingly poor job of addressing the darker side of gaming. Protecting Games attempts to solve this problem by shining a light on piracy, cheating, account theft, privacy, protecting children online and more.

The book is broken into four primary sections with piracy and cheating having the most obvious relevance. The latter two sections address social attacks from griefing to gold farming and finally a "Real World" section that seems to act as a catch-all covering relationships with third parties, real money transactions and even a brief chapter on terrorism.

The sections on piracy and cheating seem to make up the core of the book and carry with it interesting tips, anecdotes and in some cases psuedo-code that help illustrate a solution to the problem at hand. I actually walked away from these chapters feeling a bit depressed in regard to how monumental these security challenges are. It's not that you're left empty handed or unwarned. It's just that you start to feel like you're being attacked from all sides and quite frankly, you probably are. By this point in the book you're ready for a change of pace and chapter 18 (which concludes the section on cheating) comes at the perfect time. Ironically for me, I was hoping for something different than the high score cheat case study which plagues many online Flash games and are of special interest to me. It's only after devouring the chapter on network attacks that made me want to see more in that category.

What was most surprising was how game design can adversely affect security. By tweaking design documents early in the process there are some issues that can simply be mitigated instead of turning into real dollar problems that affect the integrity of the game and potentially turn away paying customers. Perhaps the author would consider changing the subtitle to "A Security Handbook for Game Developers, Designers and Publishers". That being said, I should also mention that although the book is targeted toward those in the industry there's incredibly useful information in this book for gamers and parents as well.

Protecting Games is an excellent security handbook albeit a slightly overwhelming one that deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone involved in the process of creating games. It arms us with the knowledge we need to make the right choices while navigating through the process of not only an building an entertaining game but a secure one as well.

5 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Maximus

Protect your online high score list - and much much more.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 24, 2018

Verified Purchase

I haven't actually read all of this book, but I have read enough to give my review. I have not been able to find better information online about what can go wrong with computer games when some annoying individual want to mess up your game. I was personally looking for information about how to prevent getting into problems with making internet stored high score lists for computer games, and how to prevent hacking and other annoying threats to these high score lists, and wow.. the chapter about high score lists is very inspiring and I actually learned a lot that I would not have been able to figure out myself during a brainstorming. The write writes from experience and have a lot of knowledge for sure. There is no programming examples of what to do about it, but I can figure that out myself, and the book is quite big, so of course there cannot be room for making examples codes for several programming languages like php, c#, c++ etc. although such examples would be nice to have. I do give this book 5 stars anyway, because I wouldn't dare making online high score lists for my games again without at least preventing some of the bad surprised that could happen to a game, if some idiot comes along and want to tamper with my health by messing up my high score lists - or worse other online stored information beside high score lists, like multiplayer stuff. After reading a few chapters about issues that I expect to have to deal with someday, I can see that this book can also be used by those who want to mess things up, so now all game developers ought to buy this book to prevent these things to happen - and sleep better at night by doing so. Back in the days when almost nobody knew about how to prevent website database hacking using forms and unprotected server side scripting languages, then we didn't protect the scripts properly, but thank god none of the websites I dealt with were hacked. These days books and websites tell teenagers how to mess things up, so everything has to be protected - at least when money are involved. Now its time to protect you computer games from piracy, cracking, hacking, cheating, spaming, bad words etc, and this book is probably the best book the is about these matters.

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