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Cyberwarfare

BestJamie shared this feedback ago

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I've seen a couple of suggestions about hacking, and I thought I would throw my two scents in.

I've already stated that I think that a central computer block should be the only block that carries ownership (https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers2/pc/topic/45918-computer-blocks-and-automation) but this suggestion works with or without that because it's about the actual hacking part.

First of all I think welding hacking should be done away with, because it really doesn't make sense that removing the computer from a door, then turning around and stuffing it right back in would do anything. To prevent that I think that if you grind computers from a hostile block then you should get scrap, because everything on each computer is encrypted and you don't know the password. I also think that grinding unowned blocks should have a speed penalty, to make it so you actually need to hack blocks and make your way through the inside of hostile ships when capturing them after they've been disabled rather than just grinding a hole right through to whatever part you need.

For the hacking itself, I think person-to-grid hacking and grid-to-grid hacking should work differently. First I'll explain how I think person-to-grid hacking should work since that's simpler.

When an astronaut opens the control panel on a smart object it doesn't show the entire ship instead it just shows the one item they are currently interacting with (you wouldn't be able to shut down the main reactor by messing with a door), except it has a few other options as well that aren't normally shown in the control panel. The way it works is while you're in the hacking interface you'll slowly build up a currency (let's call it infiltration). Having hacking equipment in your inventory will allow you to build infiltration faster. You can then spend infiltration on normal control panel actions, for example, if you're hacking a door, you could very cheaply open the door, or turn it off, do any other action normally in the control panel. You also have the hacking-specific options which are more expensive,

- Temporary control: allows you to temporarily make any control panel actions you want without paying infiltration(5 min)

- Block user access: this allows you to make it so that the block's owner, as well as any users that would normally be given permissions for that block no longer have permissions for it, temporarily (5 min).

- Take full control: Change ownership of the block to you

- Overload: Damage the block below operational repair, and for certain blocks such as reactors potentially damage the blocks around it. This is by far the most expensive option. It provides a 5-second countdown so that the hacker can move out of hacking range.

But there is counterplay here with cyberdefences. When infiltration is spent on a block and it has cyber defences assigned to it by building a physical cyberdefence block and selecting that cyberdefence block in the block's control panel then there is a chance for that action to trip the cyberdefences. This chance scales with the infiltration cost with more expensive actions being more likely to trip the system, and with how focused the defences are, so if the cyber defence block is only assigned to protect 1 block like the primary reactor, as opposed to being assigned to protect every single door on your ship. When it trips it does the following

- The instigating hacking attempt fails wasting the infiltration spent on it

- The cyberdefences trigger one of two actions, depending if the attack was person-to-grid or grid-to-grid.

- Any block protected by the cyberdefences can no longer be hacked by whoever tripped the cyberdefences. Any infiltration you had on it will slowly drain without you being able to use it, and things will stay that way until you either destroy the cyberdefence block or hack it. For person-to-grid hacking you can hack the cyberdefence block through any block its protecting, so if you trip the cyberdefences on a door, you can still hack through the door its just going to take way longer.

If you want to be extra secure you could even have a cyberdefence block protected by another cyberdefence block.

Grid-to-grid hacking on the other hand needs to be done from a ship and can only be done if both ships have a powered antenna (I'll add more to that in a second). When you start hacking a ship you select the target ship from the visible antenna signals on a cyberwarfare block (additional cyberwarfare blocks will just cause faster infiltration growth), then start building grid-wide infiltration. Unfortunately, you won't be able to see any blocks, to spend your infiltration on. But you will have a discover random block button which will reveal a random block to you at the cost of some infiltration. If you spend more infiltration you can influence the type of block you discover, but at the same time that will count as spending more infiltration as far as the chances of triggering a cyberdefence block are concerned. So while hacking you'll slowly reveal blocks on the enemy ship and you'll get to have a single shared infiltration pool. Cyberdefences will be more likely to trigger because of the extra infiltration you need to spend to even discover blocks, and since if you trigger cyberdefences you won't be able to do anything about it until you find the cyberdefences block that is preventing you from hacking the block you want to hack triggering cyberdefences will be more of a problem.

This system allows clever building and ship design to be able to counter hacking attempts, while also allowing a ship that builds into cyberwarfare to be able to be as much of a threat as a well-armed ship. The only downside is that if someone can tell they're dealing with someone with better cyberwarfare than them they might choose to turn their antenna off, or not to have an antenna at all. For that comms need a few small buffs, so not having comms would be enough of a downside by itself that the choice between turning comms off and keeping them on but remaining vulnerable to hacking is interesting enough to not just be automatically turning off the antenna the moment someone even tries to hack you.

For that I would suggest the following:

- Drones work better with comms (without comms they just do stuff on their own, with comms they coordinate and are unlikely to bump into each other or friendly fire)

- Medbays and survival kits cannot resurrect people immediately without a radio signal. Signalless ressurection takes like 5 minutes.

- SOS calls are a thing that exists and actually works. If you're in a fight you can call reinforcements from anyone nearby whose faction is friendly to you, or hostile to whoever you're fighting.

- Radio signals can be given effects that help astronauts in range, such as increasing stamina or decreasing suit power usage (the lore-wise explanation being that the ship's computer is processing your vital signs and telling your suit to provide small bits of active treatment to improve performance)

- If the game has any tracking munitions (as opposed to just dumb rockets and bullets like in SE1) then that only works with a radio signal.

All of that together should make it so the choice between let yourself be slowly hacked but using that extra edge to better defeat someone before the hacking is finished or weakening yourself to prevent the enemy from being able to hack you altogether (unless the enemy boards your ship) is a genuinely interesting question with different answers in different contexts.

I like this feedback

Replies (2)

Denninja ●

I like the idea of hacking currency (infiltration), and countermeasures. Also perhaps the grid's devices could contribute to a visual hacking minigame the intruder plays? For example like hacking in Deus Ex HR but the visual nodes represent actual blocks on the grid.

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BestJamie ●

Thanks! That could be interesting, since it actually adds a fail state to attempting to hack, did you have any thoughts on what a failed hack should cause? Consequences I can think of are infiltration loss, no longer being able to see some of the blocks youve already discovered and maybe the ship youre hacking gains an infiltration boost on you? What do you think?

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captainbladej52 ●

"I've already stated that I think that a central computer block should be the only block that carries ownership"

This alone sinks the whole ship and is an automatic no from me under any circumstances. Couple a block like that with your hacking proposal and you've just given griefers one of their dream features that can let them steal entire grids by hacking one block. The rest of your proposal has some promise to it, but this alone sinks the entire thing and having a block like that is never a good idea in a game like this. Doesn't matter if there's countermeasures or not, there's still way WAYYY too much potential for abuse. This feature would automatically be disabled on any server I ever hosted for that reason. While I'm open to ideas for hacking other than what we have now, even if it's just a basic "grinder" that "hacks" the blocks, this isn't the way to go about it.

The rest of your proposal has some promise, but yeah that alone kills it.

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BestJamie ●

"but this suggestion works with or without that because it's about the actual hacking part."

That was a reference to another different suggestion that I linked immediately after that, and the rest of the suggestion as I said works completely well without it, I even talk about how transferring ownership on blocks both temporarily and permanently would work in this system if you aren't treating all ownership as handled by a single central block.

I also don't think that this is going to be as helpful for griefers as you think it will be, because the only two ways to use that one central block to take control of an entire ship is to either get to the computer block in person which would involve finding a block that reasonably speaking should be in the deepest best-defended part of the ship, or by hacking the target grid for long enough that you find the computer, bypass all cybersecurity you find on the way, hack long enough to have enough infiltration to hack the central computer block, then also deal with any cybersecurity there as well before finally hacking the primary computer. And in all that time whoever you are hacking has a chance to notice you, and do something about it, including just turning off their radio so all your progress until that point is wasted, and that's assuming there isn't combat before then, because if you lose the fight you stop hacking and if you win the fight you were going to be able to take them out anyways and take control of whatever is left of their ship anyways.

The central computer block shouldn't change the outcome of fights, because its ownership will only really come into play when the outcome has already been decided. Yes someone who was already going to succeed at griefing will have an easier time, but so will someone who was almost griefed but managed to fight off the griefers, because they can just wait for all of the hacks that did get done to time out rather than needing to manually reverse them, and better for everyone it will make things easier for people who take out AI pirate ships and stations and things like that because it makes it easier to deal with the wrecks after you've won a fight without needing to go in there and hack every single block individually if you want to do something cool with the captured wrecks! That said the way I described the system does leave a small chance that the computer block might be the first block discovered, so we could just add a rule that computer blocks are always the last ones discovered to prevent that :)

"but this suggestion works with or without that because it's about the actual hacking part."

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Al Nurur ●

I counter; Why not both? People could opt for a centralized security system, or a compartmentalized system. Both have pros and cons. Having both would make infiltrating a ship slower in both regards, as the attacker has to figure out what they're even up against before they can even start. You could be designing a super futuristic space yacht that has a databank in the exact center, surrounded by tons upon tons of armour; Or you can have some ye-olde freighter, designed in the bygone era, where nothing is connected but the lights to a wire, and an attacker would have to make physical entry and only hack the bare minimum to obtain their goal.

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Tael ●

With the central-computer option I'd wonder what happens if someone just blows it up with a lucky railgun hit early on... Does the ship lose all ownership? Can you have backups? ect...

As a concept itself, I find hacking to be a bit mixed...

-The current version is just silly, and changing it to give scrap back instead of computers that you just reinstall to fix is good.

-The hack line needs to be above the function-line on a lot of blocks. A door may be computer-controlled but if someone has direct access to the wiring and knows what they're doing (like say.. a space-engineer might) then there's no reason they can't just cut the power to the locking-magnets and either pry the door or short the power around the computer and in to the motor.

-A possible no-antenna drawback could be an inability for turrets to identify the owner of a grid. Fun fact: even with modern computer systems and communications/networking equipment, automatic turrets still have issues and need to be watched by people so they don't fire at friendlies.

-Given the size and complexity of some ships, the whole "discovering blocks" thing may need to operate rather quickly in order to preserve someone's sanity. NPC ships can be rather sparce on blocks needing to be hacked, but it isn't too hard for player-stuff to get in to having hundreds of functional-blocks without trying, and you really don't want to see what happens when combat-players in SE1 realize that full air-vents have the same pcu-cost as junctions, but slightly more hp.

-It may be worth having the option to put certain blocks on a ship on a closed-network, making it a requirement to access them in person for both hacker and owner, but also giving it the drawbacks consistent with the no-antenna state (and possibly some others).

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BestJamie ●

@Tael I imagine that you can have backups, and if you hack a computer block while there's still a backup you don't get control of the ship, instead you disable that computer until you get full control. I love the turrets no longer being able to identify friendlies! I think that shouldn't apply to interior turrets but all others are good. Your turrets will still generally fire at what you want you just need to actually manage the ship's targets. It might also be interesting for the turrets to no longer be able to hit missiles!

Maybe have some arbitrarily expensive "discover all blocks" option? That way you don't need to actually be physically present to hack a ship, you just need to target it for ship-to-ship hacking, run off and do something else while it builds infiltration. Then when you get back just press "discover all" and you instantly have the whole ship visible. The length of time doesn't really matter if you can just set it and forget it :)

Closed networks are a great idea! That could loop into the idea of having both that @Al Nurur mentioned of having both where you can have either a distributed or a centralised system.

Every controllable block has a "Computer core" dropdown option in the control panel menu. This defaults to whatever computer is your primary unless you place a block before you have any computers, then it defaults to none. When set to none it disappears from the control panel and can only be reconfigured or controlled in person (This does mean if you accidentally set something to none you need to find that specific block in person to reconnect it). Disconnected blocks can only be controlled in person but have no ownership and so never need to be hacked. Meanwhile, you can also assign a block to a computer other than your primary computer. If you do that and the secondary computer is also assigned to the primary computer then it's treated normally, but If the secondary computer is configured to None, then the secondary computer and anything connected to it have their own isolated control panel, which can only be accessed remotely if there is a radio on that network.

If the computer that a block is assigned to gets destroyed its assignment gets set to None, and it becomes unowned. If you try building a computer on a grid unowned by you then it immediately gets shorted out by the computer already in control of the power network, or ownership gets automatically transferred to the ship owner, depending on the permissions that the person has!

Closed networks are a great idea! That could loop into the idea of having both that @Al Nurur mentioned of having both where you can have either a distributed or a centralised system.

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