Security in Distributed Virtual Environments
Jan Köhnlein and Helmut Weberpals
Research period: 2000-2005
Distributed Virtual Environments (DVEs) belong to the most demanding modern applications, requiring high performance graphics power as well as efficient network management. For some DVEs security is an additional issue, e.g. game server providers want to charge their clients or military simulations have to be kept confidential. The major constraints for the scalability to a large number of users and the consistency of the scene are nowadays caused by the network. Therefore, recent research has been mostly dedicated to the reduction of network latencies and the optimisation of traffic. The involved techniques often induce additional security holes.
This project demonstrates that DVEs can be implemented in a secure way using today's technology. Based on the analysis of the application specific security requirements, a secure architectural basis is designed and implemented which relies on a high-performance serialisation and communication library.