Summer Research 2017: Week 4

This week, I continued my literary review of publications regarding DDoS attacks and defenses. One of the articles I read, "A taxonomy of DDoS attack and DDoS defense mechanisms", presents two taxonomies for classifying attacks and defenses. This gives researchers a better understanding of the problem and the current solution space. The main focus of the attack portion of the article is what allows DDoS attacks to take place, as well as how are they performed. The answers to these questions gave me more insight into how our DDoS game could be developed. Because internet traffic works in an end-to-end paradigm, sending packets between users through protocols, it leaves space open for attack by the nature of its setup. This brought forth the idea of a game where the player must escape from a flood of "packets" raining down on them before being overwhelmed by data.

I also worked on fixing data issues we were having with our log:

The issue we were having was that multiple start times would show up even if the player was still on their first play-trough of the question portion. The issue appeared to be a combination of unclear mechanics for the bomb toss and players having to reset multiple times while playing on PC. To address this, I went into the scene to clarify the game mechanics for PC players and make the mouse icon change to a hand to represent the need to throw an object. However, the issue remained, so I had to reanalyze how the game log looked after going from question to question without difficulty. Some logs would have multiple questions in-between each Question Start prompt, while others would only have one each time. After looking further into it, the result was that some play-troughs would print the Question Start prompt to the log before the player had officially secured a non-passing score. My next step is to figure out how to address this so that only a non-passing score prompts the log to print a new Question Start prompt.