City: | Singapore |
Challenge Title: | GAMING CODE PROTECTION TO PREVENT MALICIOUS BEHAVIOR |
Challenge Owner: | Ubisoft |
Challenge Website: | https://www.openinnovation.sg/challenges/gaming-code-protection-to-prevent-malicious-behaviour#xetg3e |
Challenge Award: | SGD 30,000 of prize money for each winner |
Other Awards: | Potential access to Ubisoft start-up support programme |
Theme / Sector: | Security Coding |
Challenge Blurb: | Ubisoft is one of the largest publicly-traded game company in the Americas and Europe, with several development studios across the world. Ubisoft is required to protect their games against piracy and cheating – and thus against reverse engineering and tampering. They are also looking to expand the set of code protection technologies employed to protect their games. They have been looking into code protection technologies based on compile time or post-compile time obfuscation. Since games are performance-sensitive systems, some of the obfuscation technologies currently available cannot be successfully applied to games as a whole due to the significant performance overheads that affects time, memory, bandwidth and resources. Ubisoft has already explored existing solutions (VMProtect and Themida), but experienced challenges such as: Little control over the complexity of the virtual machines (VM’s), Little control over how the VM’s are applied, Little control over the performance impact of the VM’sNo support for Common Object File Format (COFF) files or raw streams of instructions. Thus, Ubisoft is looking for code protection/code virtualisation/code obfuscation technologies that would allow them to protect the code of their games without significantly affecting the overall performance. “Code” does not necessarily need to refer to the whole executable, but also to the selected individual basic blocks of instructions or functions. |
Challenge Description: | Problem Statement – What type of real-time code protection can Ubisoft incorporate into its games in order to prevent malicious behaviour by gamers, without affecting overall game experience and performance? What We Are Looking For – Proof-of-Concept (POC) of the code protector that protects Ubisoft’s games against piracy and cheating effectively and in real-timeCode Transformation/Obfuscation stage must allow Ubisoft toControl over obfuscation methodControl over obfuscation complexityControl over resulting performance overheadCode protection technology that is compatible with Ubisoft’s game codes so that overall game experience and performance do not get affectedSolution must be scalable across all of Ubisoft’s games |
Open for Submissions: | 16 April 2019 |
Deadline for Submissions: | 21 June 2019, 1600 hours (SGT/GMT +8) |
Finalist Announcement: | TBA |
Winner Announcement: | TBA |
Who Can Apply: | Open to international participants |
Registration Details: | Submit online at: https://www.openinnovation.sg/challenges/gaming-code-protection-to-prevent-malicious-behaviour#xetg3e |
For application assistance: Quercus Group