Lambda Containers: A Comprehensive Anti-Tamper Framework for Games by Simulating Client Behavior in a Cloud

As the rapid growth of smartphones, online games are starting to execute core logic on the client-side to enable rich user interactions. This trend makes it difficult to detect illegal modifications to games. This paper presents a comprehensive anti-tamper framework for games, which detects tampering by comparing the game state information submitted by the client and the genuine state information simulated by transparently executing the genuine app on a cloud. The key technology is a novel container pool that models the execution environment of apps as lambda functions by defining an app as a first-order function and a container as a higher-order function. This system, which is a meta-level system over the existing container system, provides a functional programming model designed to statically encapsulate heterogeneous environment of apps into containers and to dynamically simulate a specific game scene by injecting the game status into containers. This system optimally executes this process by translating the meta-level operations into the parameters to conventional containers. Experimental results using a real game product showed that 110 containers run in a scalable manner on a single server with 72 logical CPU cores installed on a public cloud, without sacrificing either the response or throughput performance.