Chatting Pattern Based Game BOT Detection: Do They Talk Like Us?

Among the various security threats in online games, the use of game bots is the most serious problem. Previous studies on game bot detection have proposed many methods to find out discriminable behaviors of bots from humans based on the fact that a bot's playing pattern is different from that of a human. In this paper, we look at the chatting data that reflects gamers' communication patterns and propose a communication pattern analysis framework for online game bot detection. In massive multi-user online role playing games (MMORPGs), game bots use chatting message in a different way from normal users. We derive four features; a network feature, a descriptive feature, a diversity feature and a text feature. To measure the diversity of communication patterns, we propose lightly summarized indices, which are computationally inexpensive and intuitive. For text features, we derive lexical, syntactic and semantic features from chatting contents using text mining techniques. To build the learning model for game bot detection, we test and compare three classification models: the random forest, logistic regression and lazy learning. We apply the proposed framework to AION operated by NCsoft, a leading online game company in Korea. As a result of our experiments, we found that the random forest outperforms the logistic regression and lazy learning. The model that employs the entire feature sets gives the highest performance with a precision value of 0.893 and a recall value of 0.965.