A Case for Protecting Computer Games With SGX

The integrity and confidentiality of computer games has long been a concern of game developers, both in preventing players from cheating and from obtaining unlicensed copies of the software. Recently, Intel released SGX, which can provide new security guarantees for software developers to achieve an unprecedented level of software integrity and confidentiality. To explore how SGX can protect a computer game in practice, in this paper we make a first step of exploring new ways to protect the integrity and confidentiality of game code and data, and in doing so we have developed a framework and design principles for integrating games with SGX. We have applied our framework to demonstrate how it can be used to protect a real world computer game.