Game Shield: A Comprehensive Analysis of Principles, Technical Architecture, and Service Provider Recommendations 🔥

In today's network era, games have become one of the world's most popular forms of entertainment, with the rapid development of the industry, game security threats are also increasingly rampant. ddos attacks, cc attacks, game plug-ins and other blackmail like spring, a steady stream of malicious attacks on the game developers project, resulting in the loss of many game manufacturers users, brand and asset damage. In the face of this grim situation, CDN5 specifically for game manufacturers to develop protection products [Game Shield], a complete solution to the game security problems, this article will be from the basic concept of Game Shield, the operating principle, application scenarios and the mainstream Game Shield vendors to compare, for game developers, operators and security practitioners to provide a detailed reference guide. 

Data shows that more than 40% of DDoS attacks are directed at the gaming industry. Some are peers deliberately harassing the normal operation of opponents, some are extorting money, some are even users because they are dissatisfied with the game, and some are purely for fun. In short, a variety of purposes and means of attack are constantly evolving, the attack method is not the traditional traffic flood, become more and more complex, diverse, and even some people have begun to train AI to carry out the attack, a variety of attacks to make the game manufacturers suffer.

Traditional game protection solutions collectively referred to as high imitation CDN, are the use of uniform rules on the cleaning of attack traffic, it is difficult to really distinguish between real users and attack requests, easy to distinguish between enemy and self, affecting normal users, more importantly, from the principle of traditional protection can not be a complete solution to the game security issues, so the game shield came into being.

The core of the game shield lies in the local forwarding, targeted defense, he is not a simple traffic interception cleaning, but based on the game business logic, based on the game-specific protocols, through AI and algorithms for user behavior analysis, milliseconds to intervene in the processing, the game players do not have any perception.

From the technical level, GameShield integrates the capabilities of multiple dimensions, such as distributed nodes to defend against DDOS attacks, in-depth protocol recognition and behavioral analysis to defend against CC attacks and human-computer authentication, and dynamic behavioral modeling and real-time policy scheduling to optimize network latency and defend against plug-ins. ...... Through these comprehensive capabilities, together they build an all-round, multi-dimensional defense system. Through these comprehensive capabilities, together they build an all-round, multi-layered defense system that not only protects against attacks, but also defends against game plug-in fraud and stops infiltration and invasion. ..…

Moreover, with the continuous updating of technology, GameShield has begun to train AI models, such as CDN5, through AI to build GameShield products into a comprehensive set of defense, acceleration, monitoring, data analysis products, so that the original defense for the purpose of gradually converted into business-driven tools, is becoming one of the indispensable digital infrastructure of the game industry. 

A few core features of GameShield

Distributed anti-DDOS

Game Shield is different from the traditional reliance on large bandwidth, it uses distributed anti-DD nodes, each node has an independent cleaning ability (can be simply understood as hundreds of high-fidelity CDN) and can also handle specific regional traffic. For example, when your Japanese node is attacked, the system will automatically dispatch to other nodes, these processes can not be perceived by the outside world, can be said to ignore DDOS attacks. It is worth mentioning that after the upgrade of CDN5 Game Shield also has intelligent scheduling, such as online games intelligent high-quality links, player chat messages will be reduced, and reasonable allocation of resources to enhance the scene adaptation ability and resource utilization efficiency.

Intelligent CC protection

Usually game shield products are marked immune to CC, in fact, CC attacks are occurring, but the game shield through the optimization of algorithms, user behavior analysis and AI model, the user device, operation, protocol fields, and other hundreds of dimensions of milliseconds to determine the real people and robots, the traditional CC protection is to open the validation, and CDN5 game shield based on algorithms and technology models, in the process of defending the direct and accurate Recognition, the user does not feel the existence of these operations, so it is called immunity to CC attacks, in addition, we have proved through a large number of data, AI false kill rate of 0.05%, completely ahead of any similar products in the world.

Protocol-level anti-fraud and full-chain encryption

CDN5 Game Shield analyzes all kinds of game protocols in depth, AI can fully understand the actual role of TCP, UDP, WEBSOCKET and other protocols, covering all the game protocols currently on the market loopholes and exploit techniques, through hundreds of times of training of various game models, the theft of brushes, hangers, wall penetration, transient ，，，， and other features know it well and completely blocked.

The SDK can prevent man-in-the-middle attacks and data alteration through high-strength encryption with the back-end, and we use multiple military-grade encryption algorithms and multiple authentication methods, which may take decades to completely crack. This encrypted transmission not only protects the game data security, but also utilizes hidden communication protocols to increase the difficulty of launching precise attacks.

Intelligent Acceleration

CDN5 Game Shield recognizes the player's geographic location and optimizes the proximity according to the player's geographic location to reduce network latency and packet loss. It also dynamically plans the optimal transmission path and reduces game latency through real-time analysis of node loads and other comprehensive data, and adopts CN2 direct connection + BGP intelligent scheduling for mainland China. The latency in mainland China is lower than 30ms, and the availability SLA reaches 99.99%.

The working principle of Game Shield

Understanding the working principle of GameShield can help you better utilize and select GameShield products. The following content is written by CDN5 GameShield engineers and only represents the technical principles of CDN5 products.

CDN5 GameShield uses a multi-layer architecture, exactly, the core layer is divided into 4 layers

• 1. User layer: The user layer is initially filtered and protected by the integrated SDK, which recognizes and analyzes the user's device information, root environment, and device fingerprints, and collects data for back-end use.
• 2. Network Layer: The network layer consists of globally distributed selb nodes, using IP reputation library and traffic baseline technology, filtering more than 90% of the attack traffic in the first time, and implementing near-source suppression for the identified malicious traffic, and intercepting the operation in the second layer, which not only improves the protection effect, but also reduces the cost
• 3. Access layer: the access layer consists of specially designed and optimized game security gateway, he does not deal with specific business, mainly through user behavior analysis to solve CC attacks and fraud, CDN5 embedded in this layer of the AI module, automatic decoding of the game's private protocols, real-time behavioral analysis of all the requests, connections, traffic data, etc., a single node has a million concurrent processing capabilities. At the same time, SDK and the gateway are all encrypted communication, both authentication, fundamentally solved the CC attack of TCP protocol.
• 4. Business Layer: The business layer is mainly used to deal with the game business logic, because all access has been filtered through the previous 3 layers, so it is difficult for attacks to arrive here, even if it is completely broken, the business layer is also isolated because of the physical path, so that attackers can not contact the business server, so the game is still running stably.

GameShield Application Scenarios

Multi-platform game protection
Hand game protection: mainly for mobile game APP protection, CDN5 provides Android and IOS development SDK integration packages, customers only need to integrate in various ways according to the integration document [GameShield SDK Access Guide], without changing or increasing the original package volume.
End-game and page game: end-game through the encapsulation of the way, the CDN5 Game Shield built in the client, page game can be accessed through DNS, without modifying any code, but also through the websocket protocol optimization to keep the speed stable.
Specific game scenarios
Game beta testing and activities:
When a game is just launched for beta testing or service opening, it is the easiest time for hackers and competitors to launch attacks, because the impact of the attacks and benefits can be maximized at this time, if you access CDN5 Game Shield, you don't need to worry about these problems, because the CDN5 Game Shield system will automatically identify traffic fluctuations and intelligently make real-time adjustments for specific scenarios, and the user doesn't need to pay extra extra fees, because These adjustments are intelligent, he will switch to a lower configuration to balance the cost when the user peak is reduced.
Game virtual assets:
Nowadays, games have a large number of virtual economic systems, such as props, roles, weapons and equipment, etc. These virtual assets that can be exchanged for real money are the most important targets for hackers, and they are illegally obtained through various means of attack behavior, which causes serious losses to game manufacturers.CDN5 Game Shield's AI behavioral analysis can identify these requests and quickly block them.
Gaming events:
The attention of e-competition events is very high, and game manufacturers want to expand their popularity and influence through this move, so the requirements for security and network stability are extremely high. Ordinary game shield may be difficult to cope with, only through the deployment of the tournament exclusive nodes and bandwidth, to ensure that the game can run smoothly and fairly. [Ordinary game shield manufacturers actually do not have this ability, only Ali Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Amazon Cloud, Google Cloud, CDN5, stoneCDN and other large Internet service providers have this ability].

Game Shield's industry extension application

GameShield is not only applicable to the game industry, but also to other industries, such as live broadcast platforms, IoT platforms, financial and all other APP products, which can utilize GameShield's intelligent scheduling to guarantee the quality of video transmission, and encrypted security of the device, communication, and forwarding through link encryption. At the same time to prevent the protocol vulnerability initiated by the interpretation, to protect the API and equipment from being utilized by hackers.

Comparison of mainstream game shield products and manufacturers

With the growing demand for security in the gaming industry, there are more and more manufacturers engaged in gaming security protection, and there are commonalities and differences in their respective products. An in-depth understanding of the products of different manufacturers will help you better choose the product that meets your needs.

CDN5 Game Shield

CDN5 is a globally renowned CDN service provider, and its Game Shield product is recognized as an industry leader. The main customer groups are concentrated in large game developers, especially suitable for those AAA instant games with extremely high security and speed. CDN5 deploys more than 200+ high-defense nodes globally, each of which is equipped with 1.2Tbps cleaning capacity, and adopts AI behavioral analysis and message genetics technology in CC defense, combined with full-link encryption, to completely solve the problems of CC and fraud, with a false positive rate of less than 0.05%, which is better than the industry average. In terms of CC defense, it adopts AI behavioral analysis and message gene technology combined with full-link encryption to completely solve CC and fraud problems, and the false kill rate is lower than 0.05%, which is better than the industry average. In terms of network acceleration, it adopts customized strategies, intelligently scheduling lines through user IP identification, such as adopting CDN2+BGP lines in mainland China, and distributing from Hong Kong nodes in close proximity.

StoneCDN Game Shield​

StoneCDN Game Shield is a game protection product launched by yewsafe security company, its cost-effective and flexible configuration by the world's small and medium-sized game developers love, SetoneCDN and CDN5 also adopts a layered defense system, there is not much difference between the protection and the system performance.StoneCDN's core advantage is that it is the world's first game shield manufacturer based on the AI intelligent protection, most of the work is done by AI to greatly improve the protection efficiency and reduce the cost. The core advantage of StoneCDN is that it is the first game shield manufacturer in the world based on AI intelligent protection, most of the work is done by AI, which greatly improves the protection efficiency and reduces the cost of protection.​

Other noteworthy game shield products​

 Aliyun: Aliyun's main foundation and ecological advantages, such as seamless collaboration with ESC, SLB and other products, in essence, its protection ability and price in the industry does not have any advantage.
Huawei Cloud: Huawei Cloud's products are mainly based on security compliance as a selling point, and jointly build a security compliance ecosystem with a number of security manufacturers to meet the regulatory needs of different regions, and its products are moderate.

How to choose?

How to choose a game shield products for enterprises should be considered in many ways, first of all, you need to clarify their needs, and secondly, you need to understand all the major manufacturers of products, such as CDN5 suitable for instant games and other high-end products, small and medium-sized enterprises should choose to, such as StoneCDN pay more attention to the ease of use and the economic cost of the manufacturers, mainland China record customers and have the architecture of customization, may be fast fast game shield more able to meet the requirements.

Regardless of which game shield product you choose, you should first conduct a free test, or find a third party to conduct a simulation test to verify the actual effect of the service provider, but also pay attention to the game shield manufacturer's reputation and actual cases, and regularly assess the applicability of the protection program and adjust the strategy in a timely manner. Regularly assess the applicability of the existing protection program to ensure that it is always in the best state of protection.
​​
​