Invisibility Cloak: Proactive Defense Against Visual Game Cheating

Authors: 

Chenxin Sun, Kai Ye, Liangcai Su, Jiayi Zhang, and Chenxiong Qian, The University of Hong Kong

Abstract: 

The gaming industry has experienced remarkable innovation and rapid growth in recent years. However, this progress has been accompanied by a concerning increase in First-person Shooter game cheating, with aimbots being the most prevalent and harmful tool. Visual aimbots, in particular, utilize game visuals and integrated visual models to extract game information, providing cheaters with automatic shooting abilities. Unfortunately, existing anti-cheating methods have proven ineffective against visual aimbots. To combat visual aimbots, we introduce the first proactive defense framework against visual game cheating, called Invisibility Cloak. Our approach adds imperceptible perturbations to game visuals, making them unrecognizable to AI models. We conducted extensive experiments on popular games CrossFire (CF) and Counter-Strike 2 (CS2), and our results demonstrate that Invisibility Cloak achieves real-time re-rendering of high-quality game visuals while effectively impeding various mainstream visual cheating models. By deploying Invisibility Cloak online in both CF and CS2, we successfully eliminated almost all aiming and shooting behaviors associated with aimbots, significantly enhancing the gaming experience for legitimate players.

Open Access Media

USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted after the event are also free and open to everyone. Support USENIX and our commitment to Open Access.

BibTeX
@inproceedings {299894,
author = {Chenxin Sun and Kai Ye and Liangcai Su and Jiayi Zhang and Chenxiong Qian},
title = {Invisibility Cloak: Proactive Defense Against Visual Game Cheating},
booktitle = {33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 24)},
year = {2024},
isbn = {978-1-939133-44-1},
address = {Philadelphia, PA},
pages = {3045--3061},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/sun-chenxin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

Presentation Video