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thornewill avatar image
thornewill asked

Encrypted login - real-world benefits and drawbacks

Hi all!

I went multiple times through the Encrypted logins tutorial and I must say that I am still kinda confused about this encryption's real-world usage. Currently we are using LoginWithEmailAddress option followed by LoginWithAndroid/iOSDevice for autologin purposes (no encryption involved from our side). Backend requirements to our game is basically industry-standard meta-game with plenty of items to grind/buy and possible use of cryptocurrency later. Players will also compete between each other through leaderboards positions, so naturally we want to make it hard for the cheaters.

My question is - for this case, would it be beneficial to use another encryption layer similar to the one introduced in the tutorial and what would be real world-benefits and drawbacks of this solution?

Regarding the anti-cheat solution, we will definitely use some anti-cheat checks on the server side when for example assigning XPs or items to players, but I am interested how much will another encryption layer brings benefits to us.

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Gosen Gao avatar image
Gosen Gao answered

As the doc mentions, all of our API calls are already safely encrypted to modern standards, and the standard API call encryption is everything most customers will need. Encrypted login represents an additional layer of security built around making it harder for players to use an unauthorized client. It is not foolproof - it merely increases the difficulty bar for hackers. For most developers, the mild security increase will not be worth the extra effort required.

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thornewill avatar image thornewill commented ·

Thanks for the answer, @Gosen Gao. I am aware of this piece of text in the docs. Let me just reformulate my question: Can you come up with some particular case(s) when the security benefits would be worth the extra effort?

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