Is cheating a human function? The roles of presence,state hostility,and enjoyment in an unfair video game

In sports and board games, when an opponent cheats, the other players typically greet it with disdain, anger, and disengagement. However, work has yet to fully address the role of the computer cheating in video games. In this study, participants played either a cheating or a non-cheating version of a modified open-source tower-defense game. Results indicate that when a computer competitor cheats, players perceive the opponent as being more human. Cheating also increases player aggravation and presence, but does not affect enjoyment of the experience. Additionally, players that firmly believed that their opponent was controlled by the computer exhibited significantly less state hostility compared to players that were less certain of the nature of their competitor. Game designers can integrate subtle levels of cheating into computer opponents without any real negative responses from the players. The results indicate that minor levels of cheating might also increase player engagement with video games.     

Multi-factor cheating prevention in visual secret sharing by hybrid codebooks

Visual secret sharing, or the so-called visual cryptography, is a well-known scheme that encrypts a secret image into several meaningless share images, usually printed on transparencies, and decrypts as stacking some or all share images by the human visual system. More and more researches about visual secret sharing and its applications have been recently proposed. Unfortunately, the cheating attack in which malicious participants cheat the honest one(s) by forging a fake share image has existed. Since 2006, some cheating prevention schemes have been proposed but suffered from one or more disadvantages as follows: (1) maintaining extra share images used to verify the integrity of a share image prior to stacking, (2) introducing extra pixel expansion, (3) raising heavy computation cost, and (4) giving ambiguous cheating detection. In this paper, a multi-factor cheating–preventing scheme, aiming at exploiting the hybrid codebook to hide the additional verification images into the share images, has been proposed without suffering the above-mentioned deficiencies. Two-factor cheating–detection exploits the design of verification to both share images and stacked results to deter attackers’ cheating. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed scheme is feasible.     

How to share a secret with cheaters

This paper demonstrates that Shamir's scheme [10] is not secure against certain forms of cheating. A small modification to his scheme retains the security and efficiency of the original, is secure against these forms of cheating, and preserves the property that its security does not depend on any unproven assumptions such as the intractability of computing number-theoretic functions.This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. DCR-8301212 and DCR-8352093. Part of the work was performed while the second author was a visitor at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.     

Visual secret sharing with cheating prevention revisited

Visual secret sharing (VSS) is a variant form of secret sharing, and is efficient since secret decoding only depends on the human vision system. However, cheating in VSS, first showed by Horng et al., is a significant issue like a limelight. Since then, plenty of studies for cheating activities and cheating prevention visual secret sharing (CPVSS) schemes have been introduced. In this paper, we revisit some well-known cheating activities and CPVSS schemes, and then categorize cheating activities into meaningful cheating, non-meaningful cheating, and meaningful deterministic cheating. Moreover, we analyze the research challenges in CPVSS, and propose a new cheating prevention scheme which is better than the previous schemes in the aspects of some security requirements.     

基于PKI防欺诈的门限密钥托管方案

本文基于PKI（Public Key Infrastructure）提出了一个防欺诈的密钥托管方案,并提出了密钥托管分配机制。由于该方案的秘密共享采用基于状态树的（t,n）秘密共享,所以具有计算量小,效率高的特点。这个方案不仅有效地解决了用户欺诈的问题,而且托管用户可根据需要而改变托管代理的数量。本文在数字证书的发放与密钥托管之间建立了一种机制,把两者联系在一起,以真正实现密钥托管的目的。     

Learning–testing process in classroom: An empirical simulation model

This paper presents an empirical micro-simulation model of the teaching and the testing process in the classroom (Programs and sample data are available – the actual names of pupils have been hidden). It is a non-econometric micro-simulation model describing informational behaviors of the pupils, based on the observation of the pupils’ communication behavior during lessons and tests. The representation of the knowledge process is very simplified. However, we tried to study the involvements of individual motivation, capability and relationship with other pupils of each pupil, to compare them to the new-classical (and keynesian) and Austrian information and knowledge theoretical results. It is a first step and future development should concern expectation behaviors and dynamics. This paper aims too to give, we hope so, some criteria of pupils’ rationality in the classroom.     

Cheating detection through game time modeling: A better way to avoid time cheats in P2P MOGs?

Cheating is a key issue in online games. Whatever the rules that govern a game, some players will always be tempted to break or elude these rules so as to gain an unfair advantage over other players. Mitigation schemes are thus needed in online gaming platforms. However, it is widely recognized that typical cheating prevention schemes introduce complications and overheads in the distributed game system, which may seriously jeopardize the online gaming experience. It turns out that, often, detecting the cheaters, instead of preventing the cheats, could represent a viable solution, especially for time cheats. We present a general framework able to model game time advancements in P2P online games. Based on this framework, time cheat detection schemes can be easily devised, which monitor the communication patterns among peers and do not affect the performances of the game system. To provide evidence of our claim, we present in this paper two different time cheats, namely fast rate cheat and look-ahead cheat, and discuss on practicable methods to detect them. Simulation results confirm the viability of the proposed approach.

网络入侵诱骗技术在高校网络安全中的研究与实现

近年来,网络入侵诱骗技术的研究引起了人们很大的关注,它是一种应用欺骗思想的主动防御技术。网络入侵诱骗技术已经在安全领域得到了大量的应用,体现出了独特的价值和优势。分析网络入侵诱骗在网络安全中的主动防护特性,将其应用部署到高校网络中,提高对校园网信息的安全保护。     

A social-cognitive approach to online game cheating

Drawing upon social cognitive theory, the present study constructed a conceptual model to provide an in-depth understanding of the key psychosocial factors shaping the cheating behavior in online multiplayer games. An online survey approach and structural equation modeling were adopted to investigate the hypothesized relationships and to assess the fitness of the model. The findings of this study provided support for the research model and the social cognitive theory perspective on game cheating behavior. The cheating behavior was found to be influenced by both external and self-generated factors. Specifically, individual gamers’ social environment (peer influence), their own attitude towards game cheating, and evaluation of cheating outcomes played an important role in shaping this problematic behavior in online games. Game cheating self-efficacy was interestingly found to be an insignificant factor for the game cheating behavior. The study fills a gap in the current literature on games and cheating, specifically on the social cognitive mechanisms of the cheating behavior in online multiplayer games.