How safe is "the future of browser gaming"?

Question

HTML5 will be widely adopted as a way to design games, is the prediction. But I have my questions about this: how can an online HTML5 game ever be secure?

Let me give you an example: imagine this platform game where you gain badges when you win, for example, an extremely hard level. When you have actually won this badge, a request is made to the server, in order to update your online profile. Isn't it extremely simple for a hacker to just send this request and gain the badge, without playing the actual game? Because:

• The client-side source code is visible and impossible to hide
• It is possible to execute Javascript from the command-line

I don't see a way to prevent this hacker from gaining his badge... Is there any way to make this game safe?

Answer 1

Yes, if you designed your game like that, it would be very easy to hack. But why is this specific to HTML5? You could do that with any type of game that was written like that. Even with a native desktop game you could still fake the request. The only difference is that faking HTTP requests is easier than reverse-engineering requests made by a desktop game.

The solution would be to add some kind of "validation" to the victory--the actual algorithm would vary from game to game. Maybe have the server track the game's progress while the user is playing. If it were a game of chess, for example, you could send every move to the server and have the moves validated to make sure they work out correctly. This gets more complicated with real-time games, though.

But whatever algorithm you decide to use, it will be defeated. Even the chess validation that I just mentioned could be bypassed: you could just "create" your own valid game of chess and just send the same moves to the server every time, ensuring that the game was valid. (This is assuming that the player is against a computer--having two humans play against each other would make things easier.)

Answer 2

It's no different from any Flash-based game or indeed a game with a downloadable client like World of Warcraft. Anything integral to the game's fairness has to be handled on the server.