ICAC-Informed Threat Models for Safer Cryptographic Design in Online Gaming Platforms (G23c)
Online gaming platforms increasingly relies on encrypted messaging, pseudonymous identities, client-side key management, and modular communication components to deliver secure user experiences. While these cryptographic capabilities support privacy, they are also routinely exploited by threat actors. ICAC investigators frequently encounter grooming, exploitation, and radicalization behaviors that move rapidly from public gameplay to encrypted direct messages, voice channels, and off-platform encrypted ecosystems. These patterns generate real-world safety challenges that current cryptographic architectures do not fully address. This talk provides field-derived behavioral insights collected from a phenomenological study on threat actors targeting children online through the lens of ICAC professionals, and translates them into cryptographically aligned threat models relevant to encrypted gaming platforms and adjacent communication systems. Rather than advocating for weakened encryption, the session proposes privacy-preserving design strategies such as metadata integrity proofs, verifiable audit signaling, client-side anomaly detection, abuse-aware key lifecycle policies, and privacy-preserving identity-binding mechanisms. These approaches demonstrate how platforms can reduce adversarial misuse while still preserving strong E2EE guarantees. The recent advances in privacy-preserving cryptography and encrypted ecosystem safety provide a strong technical foundation for the approaches proposed in this session. Research in areas such as client-side detection, on-device blocklisting, secure metadata validation, verifiable event proofs, accountability in anonymous systems, and privacy-preserving machine learning demonstrates that it is possible to detect harmful or anomalous behavior without exposing message content or weakening end-to-end encryption. This emerging body of work supports the session’s core premise, the modern cryptographic techniques can enable platforms to identify abuse-related patterns, generate safety-relevant integrity signals, and strengthen identity and key-management workflows while preserving user confidentiality. These findings reinforce that architectural and cryptographic design choices, rather than decryption or surveillance, offer the most effective path for improving safety in encrypted gaming and social ecosystems.