SoK: Another Arms Race – 20 Years of (Anti-)Cheating in Video Games

Abstract

Video gaming is one of the largest sectors of the software industry. Game security is a paramount yet uniquely challenging concern. Beyond defending against conventional security threats, video games must deal with a highly motivated adversary from their own ranks: the cheater.

Cheaters seek to gain unfair advantages, undermining both the economic viability and the competitive fairness of video games. By the virtue of being an ever existing plague, the industry and related work indicate having hardships with addressing cheating. In particular, the community lacks a cohesive, systematic understanding of cheating in video games. Current literature is fragmented, focusing on isolated exploits rather than a unified architectural view of the threat landscape.

Our work addresses this critical gap by providing a comprehensive systematization of video game cheating. We systematize 187 scientific publications spanning the last two decades. Based on established knowledge systematization methodologies, we synthesize our findings into a detailed, holistic attack tree, spanning six major cheating areas with 192 nodes. We map the heterogeneous cheating strategies to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, providing a structured taxonomy of game-specific attack vectors. We enrich our work by presenting 54 safeguards for the attacks.

Reference

@inproceedings{conf/usenix/klostermeyer26,
 address = {Baltimore, MD},
 author = {Philip Klostermeyer and Jan-Ulrich Holtgrave and Jacques Suray and Anne Vonderheide and Nicolas Lodzig and Niklas Busch and Alexander Krause and Jan H. Klemmer and Marten Oltrogge and Sascha Fahl},
 booktitle = {35th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 26)},
 month = {aug},
 pages = {7015--7034},
 publisher = {USENIX Association},
 title = {SoK: Another Arms Race – 20 Years of (Anti-)Cheating in Video Games},
 url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity26/presentation/klostermeyer},
 year = {2026}
}