The appraiser played a game of "Chicken" for several days to reveal the inside story of cheating infringement

The appraiser played a game of "Chicken" for several days to reveal the inside story of cheating infringement

The story behind the first domestic case in which a game company sued a peripheral manufacturer

□ Reporter Yu Dongming

□ Intern of this newspaper Zhang Ruoqi

"Good luck, let's eat chicken tonight!" Anyone who likes online games knows that the so-called chicken is not really chicken. It refers to a very fashionable and popular online game - Peace Elite.

"After taking over the 'Chicken' game plug-in infringement case, I did not conduct an appraisal directly. Instead, I played the 'Chicken' game crazily with my colleagues for a few days." Recently, the Institute of Forensic Identification Science (hereinafter referred to as the Institute of Judicial Appraisal) Guo Hong, a senior engineer at the Audiovisual and Electronic Data Identification Research Laboratory, told a reporter from the Rule of Law Daily about an identification case involving game plug-ins that he handled three years ago.

Before being transferred to the Si Jian Yuan, Guo Hong had been working at the Third Research Institute of the Ministry of Public Security and had handled many "first cases in the country", such as the country's first Weibo cheat case, the country's first WeChat cheat case, and the country's largest Foreign-related credit card fraud cases, etc.

She was not familiar with the "Chicken" game before, so before the appraisal began, she and another appraiser worked overtime to run the game, mainly to master the game's operating mode and become familiar with the game operations.

"Traditional plug-ins are actually cheating programs that break through the technical protection measures of online games. They are generally divided into two types, one is offline plug-ins, and the other is to modify the memory of the game client. What we are doing this time is one New type of plug-in - physical plug-in." When it comes to plug-ins, Guo Hong is like a game expert.

The time goes back to April 20, 2020. Tencent approached the Si Jian Yuan and requested a judicial appraisal of the Peace Elite (chicken eating) plug-in infringement case. "Software plug-ins are easier to identify, but hardware plug-ins are difficult to identify. This is the first domestic case in which a game company sued a peripheral manufacturer. This identification result is urgently needed in the lawsuit, but at that time no identification agency had conducted this process. Class identification." Guo Hong said.

The two physical plug-ins involved in the case are small game controllers. Peace Elite is a shooting game. These two plug-ins can use preset high-frequency pulse signals to simulate the signals generated by human hands touching the mobile phone screen to achieve rapid touch screen click effects. These two plug-ins are used in the game, one is to increase the rate of fire of the gun, and the other is to enable the gun that cannot fire bullets continuously to have a continuous fire function. As the product's advertising slogan says: Connect dots with one click and eat chicken from a distance.

The commission that Guo Hong and the others accepted was to test the difference in the time it takes to shoot a magazine of bullets with and without plug-ins in the game training ground mode.

"We use a stopwatch to time each gun. Each gun is equipped with 5 boxes of bullets. During the identification process, screen recordings are conducted in accordance with the specifications." Guo Hong told reporters that each box of bullets has 30 rounds. They extracted the screen recordings into frame-by-frame images. , and then analyze the time interval between the two bullets to measure the speed.

"Since the number of frames per second is not fixed in actual operations, we have to watch every frame." Guo Hong admitted to reporters that such an inspection workload was very heavy, and three appraisers worked continuously for many days.

Finally, after repeated testing, the average rate of fire of each gun with and without the weapon was determined. One of the plug-ins can complete a box in 5.54 seconds after being activated, the other plug-in only takes 3.8 seconds after being activated, and without the plug-in it takes 7.8 seconds to complete a box.

This seemingly simple identification conclusion was actually arrived at by Guo Hong and his colleagues after looking at more than 8,000 pictures.

Guo Hong's main specialty is electronic data identification. Most game private servers and plug-in identification involve this aspect, but there are exceptions. In 2018, the Shanghai police found Guo Hong and handed her a case of piracy of online games.

The tricky part is that the code cannot be extracted in this case. “Generally speaking, when we identify a game for copyright infringement, we compare the similarities between code A and code B. However, in this case, the infringing party refused to cooperate with the identification and provide the game code, so we could only do image identification. "So, Guo Hong handed the case over to Lu Qimeng, an engineer who specializes in image identification.

The inspection material Lu Qimeng received was just a blurry video. "There is no code, and the infringing game has been removed from the shelves. Only this video recorded while playing the game is left." Lu Qimeng said, and the video definition is very poor, and it was shot with other devices facing the mobile phone screen.

Fortunately, Si Jian Yuan's image sharpening processing technology is "unparalleled". In their first step, they classified the 3 minutes and 21 seconds of video according to content and then sharpened it.

The second step is to analyze how similar the two games are. Anyone who has played online games knows that each game scene consists of many parts: the health bar for fighting monsters, the form of NPCs, dialog boxes, welfare halls, taskbars... After comparing the two games, Lu Qimeng found that they Almost exactly the same!

"I remember there was a scene that showed the player's force value. There were dynamic images of flames in it. There were 9 frames in total. We analyzed and found that the shapes of the flames in the 9 images were exactly the same." Lu Qimeng told reporters.

After more than 20 days of rigorous analysis, Lu Qimeng and others came to an appraisal opinion: except for the game names and some numerical contents, the other corresponding contents of the two games are consistent.

This is not the first game case that Lu Qimeng has handled, but this case is particularly special and has left a deep impression on her to this day. "The identification in this case is different from the conventional image identity identification, which involves the identification of image similarity. At that time, the application field of this technology was still relatively small."

But the lack of applications does not mean that breakthroughs are completely impossible. Lu Qimeng opened the appraisal opinion letter, which recorded in detail the similarity comparison of each scene of the inspection material, and attached comparison pictures.

"When the infringed party does not have more evidence, without our appraisal report, the case may not even be established, let alone rights protection." Lu Qimeng said that in today's popular online games, everyone has the responsibility to protect intellectual property rights. , as an appraiser, you need to work harder to provide "different kinds of support."

Source: Rule of Law Daily-Rule of Law Network