Treffer: Formalizing Rollback Netcodes for Robust and Real-Time Client-Server Architectures
Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik
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International audience ; The rapid growth of the gaming industry has made netcodes (the part of an online game’s source code that handles networking and synchronization) a critical component of the online multiplayer experience. Among various approaches, rollback netcodes have become a popular choice for real-time games due to their ability to enhance responsiveness and player immersion. However, despite their widespread adoption, these netcodes remain susceptible to subtle latency-based attacks that can be challenging to detect. Notably, while rollback netcodes play a critical role in the gaming industry and share similarities with synchronization mechanisms in distributed systems, they have received relatively limited attention in academic research. In this work, we present a formal specification of rollback netcodes and identify key behavioral properties and requirements to strengthen their resilience against latency-based attacks that are prevalent in gaming, such as lag-switch and DDoS attacks. Our analysis allows us to explore the trade-offs between preserving immersive gameplay and ensuring security. Our findings reveal that ideal immersion requires strict assumptions about network latency, which are unattainable in adversarial environments where message delays are inevitable.