Distributed virtual environment scalability and security

Distributed virtual environments (DVEs) have been an active area of research and engineering for more than 20 years. The most widely deployed DVEs are network games such as Quake, Halo, and World of Warcraft (WoW), with millions of users and billions of dollars in annual revenue. Deployed DVEs remain expensive centralized implementations despite significant research outlining ways to distribute DVE workloads. This dissertation shows previous DVE research evaluations are inconsistent with deployed DVE needs. Assumptions about avatar movement and proximity - fundamental scale factors - do not match WoW’s workload, and likely the workload of other deployed DVEs. Alternate workload models are explored and preliminary conclusions presented. Using realistic workloads it is shown that a fully decentralized DVE cannot be deployed to today’s consumers, regardless of its overhead. Residential broadband speeds are improving, and this limitation will eventually disappear. When it does, appropriate security mechanisms will be a fundamental requirement for technology adoption. A trusted auditing system (“Carbon”) is presented which has good security, scalability, and resource characteristics for decentralized DVEs. When performing exhaustive auditing, Carbon adds 27% network overhead to a decentralized DVE with a WoW-like workload. This resource consumption can be reduced significantly, depending upon the DVE’s risk tolerance. Finally, the Pairwise Random Protocol (PRP) is described. PRP enables adversaries to fairly resolve probabilistic activities, an ability missing from most decentralized DVE security proposals. Thus, this dissertations contribution is to address two of the obstacles for deploying research on decentralized DVE architectures. First, lack of evidence that research results apply to existing DVEs. Second, the lack of security systems combining appropriate security guarantees with acceptable overhead

Models, methods, and tools for developing MMOG backends on commodity clouds

Online multiplayer games have grown to unprecedented scales, attracting millions of players worldwide. The revenue from this industry has already eclipsed well-established entertainment industries like music and films and is expected to continue its rapid growth in the future. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have also been extensively used in research studies and education, further motivating the need to improve their development process. The development of resource-intensive, distributed, real-time applications like MMOG backends involves a variety of challenges. Past research has primarily focused on the development and deployment of MMOG backends on dedicated infrastructures such as on-premise data centers and private clouds, which provide more flexibility but are expensive and hard to set up and maintain. A limited set of works has also focused on utilizing the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer of public clouds to deploy MMOG backends. These clouds can offer various advantages like a lower barrier to entry, a larger set of resources, etc. but lack resource elasticity, standardization, and focus on development effort, from which MMOG backends can greatly benefit. Meanwhile, other research has also focused on solving various problems related to consistency, performance, and scalability. Despite major advancements in these areas, there is no standardized development methodology to facilitate these features and assimilate the development of MMOG backends on commodity clouds. This thesis is motivated by the results of a systematic mapping study that identifies a gap in research, evident from the fact that only a handful of studies have explored the possibility of utilizing serverless environments within commodity clouds to host these types of backends. These studies are mostly vision papers and do not provide any novel contributions in terms of methods of development or detailed analyses of how such systems could be developed. Using the knowledge gathered from this mapping study, several hypotheses are proposed and a set of technical challenges is identified, guiding the development of a new methodology. The peculiarities of MMOG backends have so far constrained their development and deployment on commodity clouds despite rapid advancements in technology. To explore whether such environments are viable options, a feasibility study is conducted with a minimalistic MMOG prototype to evaluate a limited set of public clouds in terms of hosting MMOG backends. Foli lowing encouraging results from this study, this thesis first motivates toward and then presents a set of models, methods, and tools with which scalable MMOG backends can be developed for and deployed on commodity clouds. These are encapsulated into a software development framework called Athlos which allows software engineers to leverage the proposed development methodology to rapidly create MMOG backend prototypes that utilize the resources of these clouds to attain scalable states and runtimes. The proposed approach is based on a dynamic model which aims to abstract the data requirements and relationships of many types of MMOGs. Based on this model, several methods are outlined that aim to solve various problems and challenges related to the development of MMOG backends, mainly in terms of performance and scalability. Using a modular software architecture, and standardization in common development areas, the proposed framework aims to improve and expedite the development process leading to higher-quality MMOG backends and a lower time to market. The models and methods proposed in this approach can be utilized through various tools during the development lifecycle. The proposed development framework is evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively. The thesis presents three case study MMOG backend prototypes that validate the suitability of the proposed approach. These case studies also provide a proof of concept and are subsequently used to further evaluate the framework. The propositions in this thesis are assessed with respect to the performance, scalability, development effort, and code maintainability of MMOG backends developed using the Athlos framework, using a variety of methods such as small and large-scale simulations and more targeted experimental setups. The results of these experiments uncover useful information about the behavior of MMOG backends. In addition, they provide evidence that MMOG backends developed using the proposed methodology and hosted on serverless environments can: (a) support a very high number of simultaneous players under a given latency threshold, (b) elastically scale both in terms of processing power and memory capacity and (c) significantly reduce the amount of development effort. The results also show that this methodology can accelerate the development of high-performance, distributed, real-time applications like MMOG backends, while also exposing the limitations of Athlos in terms of code maintainability. Finally, the thesis provides a reflection on the research objectives, considerations on the hypotheses and technical challenges, and outlines plans for future work in this domain

CONTRACTUAL GOVERNANCE OF ONLINE COMMUNITIES – (PROPERTY) RIGHTS DISPUTES IN VIRTUAL WORLDS

Considering law’s difficult ride on the coattails of societal and technological progress, this thesis discusses property rights disputes in virtual worlds, the origin and foundation of (property) rights in characters, objects and items (virtual assets), and the possibility of contractual governance. Investing considerable time, effort and money to create, develop and accumulate virtual assets to gain prestige or competitive advantage, or simply to have more fun playing, users often build strong emotional connections to their characters and place a high value on accumulated operator, third user and user-generated content. But the user’s experience of virtual assets as property, contrasts starkly with most in-world property models where first property rights belong to the operator, subsequent rights are delineated by contract, and emerging property rights are transferred to the operator or waived by the user. Noting the ‘technologically inaccurate portrayal of software’ in legislation, jurisprudence and legal debate, that ignores its ‘physical properties of mass and volume’, and the influence of client/server system architecture on the allocation of personal property rights, this thesis shows that physical and intellectual rights cannot resolve the newly emerging property rights disputes in virtual worlds. Instead of making another helpless attempt to justify a new virtual property right that still cannot overcome an enforceable transfer/waiver of (future) (property) rights clause in the contract, this author questions common concepts of property and proposes a new quasi-property right. Originated in the contractual obligation of the operator to grant the user a right to use, to exclude other users from and to transfer virtual assets, the rules of conduct included in the multiple-separate user contract complete its quasi-absolute effect. This quasi-property right does not only complement the quasi-tort, quasi-criminal and quasi-constitutional system already established by the (virtual social) contract but supports the identification of the contract (terms) as new default legal rules for VWs and similar online communities

Code: Version 2.0

Discusses the regulation of cyberspace via code, as well as possible trends to expect in this regulation. Additional topics discussed in this context include intellectual property, privacy, and free speech

Born Digital / Grown Digital: Assessing the Future Competitiveness of the EU Video Games Software Industry

This report reflects the findings of the JRC-IPTS study on the Video games Industry, with a focus on two specific activities: online and mobile video games. The report starts by introducing the technologies, their characteristics, market diffusion and barriers to take up, and their potential economic impact, before moving to an analysis of their contribution to the competitiveness of the European ICT industry. The research is based on internal and external expertise, literature reviews and desk research, several workshops and syntheses of the current state of the knowledge. The results were reviewed by experts and in dedicated workshops. The report concludes that the general expectations for the next years foresee a speeded up migration of contents and services to digital, in a scenario of rapidly increasing convergence of digital technologies and integration of media services taking advantage of improved and permanent network connections. The role of the so-called creative content industry is expected to increase accordingly. Communication services and media industry will co-evolve on the playground of the Internet of services, along with a product to service transformation of the software market in general. In this general context the Video games Software industry plays and is expected to play a major role. The games industry may become a major driver of the development of networks as it has been in the past for the development of computer hardware.JRC.DDG.J.4-Information Societ

Reality Hackers: The Next Wave of Media Revolutionaries

Just as the printing press gave rise to the nation-state, emerging technologies are reshaping collective identities and challenging our understanding of what it means to be human. Should citizens have the right to be truly anonymous on-line? Should we be concerned about the fact that so many people are choosing to migrate to virtual worlds? Are injectible microscopic radio-frequency ID chips a blessing or a curse? Is the use of cognitive enhancing nootropics a human right or an unforgivable transgression? Should genomic data about human beings be hidden away with commercial patents or open-sourced like software? Should hobbyists known as biohackers be allowed to experiment with genetic engineering in their home laboratories? The time-frame for acting on such questions is relatively short, and these decisions are too important to be left up to a small handful of scientists and policymakers. If democracy is to continue as a viable alternative to technocracy, the average citizen must become more involved in these debates. To borrow a line from the computer visionary Ted Nelson, all of us can -- and must -- understand technology now. Challenging the popular stereotype of hackers as ciminal sociopaths, reality hackers uphold the basic tenets of what Steven Levy (1984) terms the hacker ethic. These core principles include a commitment to: sharing, openness, decentralization, public access to information, and the use of new technologies to make the world a better place.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1000/thumbnail.jp

Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud

Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp