Flash games hack, score is 49700?? How to improve flash games security?

Question

I have 2 flash games (written in as3). Both the highscore value being hacked. The normal range of each game score is not more than 5000 (normal users, will only get 2000 - 3000

Answer 1

By far the easiest method, and hardest to defeat in Flash is to use CheatEngine to simply search for the memory location that stores the score, then change the value to whatever you want. All the server-submit hashing/salting/verification in the world won't fix that because your game thinks it's valid before it packages it up in a nice valid hash for submission.

You can do 'sanity checks' on the scores if they will always fall within predefined values, but even then a determined hacker could simply suss out what the maximum allowed values is and always submit that value.

You could attempt to obfuscate your score values in memory to make them harder to find with CheatEngine, for example storing them as a multiplied value, then in your getters and setters for the score value, include a multiplication/division of the values to get/set the proper score for your views and score submission widgets. Even this is only a stall tactic though.

Unless bogus scores are costing you money, either don't worry about wasting time on the .01% of people who are cheating, or just moderate your score tables manually.

The key thing to consider in preventing cheating is: 'How much does this really matter?' If you're running some kind of high score based competition with a cash prize, then it's a pretty high priority. If you're just miffed that some random person is messing up your high scores table, it's not worth your time to stop them, just check it once a week and drop the bad scores.