Potential security issues

If you have thought about the security issues your app might have, then this post is for you.

Our company ZeroCorp has started to develop an app, which helps students manage time better. Our team just kept a presentation about the backlog, which is basically a list of upcoming tasks. In the presentation I presented our “Motivation System,” which consists of a reward system and a leaderboard system. You might be wondering; how does this have anything to do with security? After presenting, I started wondering about the security aspect of our app. If the security is not good enough, the user could hack as many coins as possible or hack themself on top of the leaderboard.
 
After a long time of thinking, I came up with a brilliant solution. I must implement antihacking software or in other words: an anticheat. It is very easy to implement but molding it superior is another huge problem, which could be hard to tackle.

The anticheat is a very simple program, that is ran aside the full application. It shouldn’t be possible to notice its existence, hopefully. If the user somehow manages to notice it, then it would be safe to assume that they are cheating or at least going to cheat. The program checks if the user is running any weird software on their computer, like the infamous “Cheat Engine”, which many cheaters have used previously in different games.  There’s also a system in place, which checks the total amount of coins earned. If that count doesn’t match with the experience earned: It will detect the tampering with the app and give a permanent ban.
 
Congratulations for reaching the end. I learned many things while making my software. It’s hard to check if the user is cheating or not because some users might be good and have a tremendous number of coins. Sometimes the user might buy coins, which should be considered. My anticheat is still under development, so it might have multiple problems. I am eager to get the full application to the beta phase, so I could see my little program in action, and fix possible issues with it. Thank you and see you in the next post.