IACR News item: 07 July 2025
Hayder Tirmazi
Speedrunning is a competition that emerged from communities of early video
games such as Doom (1993). Speedrunners try to finish a game in minimal
time. Provably verifying the authenticity of submitted speedruns is an open
problem. Traditionally, best-effort speedrun verification is conducted by on-site
human observers, forensic audio analysis, or a rigorous mathematical analysis
of the game mechanics1. Such methods are tedious, fallible, and, perhaps worst
of all, not cryptographic. Motivated by naivety and the Dunning-Kruger effect,
we attempt to build a system that cryptographically proves the authenticity of
speedruns. This paper describes our attempted solutions and ways to circumvent
them. Through a narration of our failures, we attempt to demonstrate the difficulty
of authenticating live and interactive human input in untrusted environments, as
well as the limits of signature schemes, game integrity, and provable play.
Additional news items may be found on the IACR news page.