Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Sanna, Alessandro, Verstraete, Waldo, Regano, Leonardo, Maiorca, Davide, De Sutter, Bjorn
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04261
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866918502495944704
author Sanna, Alessandro
Verstraete, Waldo
Regano, Leonardo
Maiorca, Davide
De Sutter, Bjorn
author_facet Sanna, Alessandro
Verstraete, Waldo
Regano, Leonardo
Maiorca, Davide
De Sutter, Bjorn
contents Evidence on the effectiveness of Man-At-The-End (MATE) software protections, such as code obfuscation, has mainly come from limited empirical research. Recently, however, an automatable method was proposed to obtain statistical models of the required effort to attack (protected) software. The proposed method was sketched for a number of attack strategies but not instantiated, evaluated, or validated for those that require human interaction with the attacked software. In this paper, we present a full instantiation of the method to obtain statistical effort models for game resource localisation attacks, which represent a major step towards creating game cheats, a prime example of MATE attacks. We discuss in detail all relevant aspects of our instantiation and the results obtained for two game use cases. Our results confirm the feasibility of the proposed method and its utility for decision support for users of software protection tools. These results open up a new avenue for obtaining models of the impact of software protections on reverse engineering attacks, which will scale much better than empirical research involving human participants.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_04261
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Statistical Effort Modelling of Game Resource Localisation Attacks
Sanna, Alessandro
Verstraete, Waldo
Regano, Leonardo
Maiorca, Davide
De Sutter, Bjorn
Cryptography and Security
Evidence on the effectiveness of Man-At-The-End (MATE) software protections, such as code obfuscation, has mainly come from limited empirical research. Recently, however, an automatable method was proposed to obtain statistical models of the required effort to attack (protected) software. The proposed method was sketched for a number of attack strategies but not instantiated, evaluated, or validated for those that require human interaction with the attacked software. In this paper, we present a full instantiation of the method to obtain statistical effort models for game resource localisation attacks, which represent a major step towards creating game cheats, a prime example of MATE attacks. We discuss in detail all relevant aspects of our instantiation and the results obtained for two game use cases. Our results confirm the feasibility of the proposed method and its utility for decision support for users of software protection tools. These results open up a new avenue for obtaining models of the impact of software protections on reverse engineering attacks, which will scale much better than empirical research involving human participants.
title Statistical Effort Modelling of Game Resource Localisation Attacks
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04261