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Cryptography Brings Added Security To Flash Game For Rendition Multimedia

RPMworld is a Virtual Drag Racing simulation that was losing customers due to efforts by many players to cheat the game. In an effort to thwart these cheaters, Rendition Multimedia has recently released a significant update to their popular Flash game. By incorporating a very light weight cryptography algorithm, the game can encipher data that it transmits back and forth over the Internet. This client-server security was a very important enhancement since hackers often manipulate the transmission in order to trick the game server into accepting counterfeit data.

"We built our game with Macromedia Flash because it offers an extremely rapid development environment" said Rendition Multimedia president Brian Busche.

Nevertheless, his company struggled to find a way to protect the data streaming between the Flash client and the game servers that keep score. These servers are a vital part of the game's peer-to-peer functionality which lets a user drag race other live players. In December 2004, Rendition Multimedia discovered an encryption method that worked extremely well, without degrading the performance of Macromedia's Flash player.

"The added protection against cheating has gained widespread praise among our veteran players" said Busche.

Previous attempts to use crypto algorithms had caused serious performance issues for their Flash game.

RPMworld, with its new security measures, now receives an average of 1,500 players per day. Busche, a certified Macromedia Flash MX 2004 developer, recently gave a presentation on this encryption implementation at the Midwest Macromedia Studio Users Group (mmsug.org). His company hopes to work with other game developers to further the use of Flash as a rapid development tool for online games.

"I think adding the ability to encrypt the data that Flash games send and receive over the Internet will add to the growing number of inexpensive online games the web has to offer" Busche said.

Busche went on to say that encrypting the data between the client and server offers good - but not invulnerable -protection of player data.