Las Vegas casino games today are trying for a win by adding encryption and network connectivity for download.
Today’s Las Vegas-style slot machines and casino games are electronic boxes that are built to send data out but not download it, a design rule set by gaming regulators. But Bally Technologies, the 75-year-old gaming systems manufacturer, wants to change that with networked server-based casino games secured using encryption.
“In gaming regulations, there’s been the belief that the game had to be stand-alone and not bidirectional,” says Bruce Rowe, senior vice president of strategy and business development at Bally Technologies, whose 368,000 machines are used in hundreds of gaming locales, including Harrah’s Entertainment, Mohegan Sun, Foxwoods Resort Casino, and Trump Casino. “Today, digital games have to be physically loaded on an EPROM device. But in the future, we want to move content down the wire.”
Rowe said the gaming industry’s regulators are open to the idea that modern network-based casino games can be built with appropriate security to remotely manage updates such as new games.
To prove it, Bally Technologies expects to finish building server-based casino-game prototypes by the middle of next year that will encrypt data streams and authenticate management control using public-key encryption.
These prototypes will be built using Certicom’s elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) in Certicom’s specialty product called the Game Guardian certificate-authority server and client. The Game Guardian software provides encryption and authentication of connections between gaming machines, applications and back-end servers using digital certificates. The Game Guardian works with several server platforms, including Windows, Unix and Linux.
These server-based prototypes would be submitted for testing and certification by the laboratories in Nevada, Mississippi and other states that review gaming industry equipment, Rowe points out. “The state’s number one concern is integrity, and this industry is more highly regulated than nuclear energy.”
Elliptic-curve technology is a type of encryption that is generally regarded as more efficient security in terms of per-bit increase in key size than either the RSA or Diffie-Hellman public-key system, so it scales well.
A published National Security Agency background on ECC describes it by saying, “Although elliptic arithmetic is slightly more complex per bit than either RSA or DH arithmetic, the added strength per bit more than makes up for any extra compute time.”
Bill Lattin, chief technology officer at Certicom, says Certicom’s ECC 256-bit field size is roughly comparable in strength to a 3,072-bit RSA algorithm.
Rowe said Bally Technologies chose the Certicom elliptic-curve encryption technology because it does seem to have these type of advantages. The Certicom encryption would be built into game-agent software that will be able to connect to host devices to authenticate the games using digital-signature technology and public-key certificates.
Rowe said he believes other manufacturers are also considering adopting encryption-based technologies to build a new generation of casino games, but public announcements on that score are yet to come.
