My parley into an RPG happened back in 1993. BayMOO isn’t so much a role-playing game as much as a massive immersive development community. Though its hay day has passed, BayMOO resides on the net and its teachings still live on its dedicated groupies. Much can be learned from this experience that some of today’s purveyors of online worlds should heed. To SecondLife and World of Warcraft, to name a few, the analogous Moore’s Law is about to take on its own life.

We are on the cusp of an ever-increasing difficult differentiation between our digital lives and real world selves. The online community or ‘in world’ entity is about to break into the real world. The massive extensiveness of today’s online worlds face their own challenges. As entities rush to make seamless connectivity between IRL and in-game facades this accelerating merge of digital and real will present new serious security hurdles in 2007.

My foreseeable expectations in 2007 for these online worlds grows nearly as quickly as their user base, allow me to highlight two topics.

The Linden Dollar becomes More Acceptable

Speaking specifically to Second Life, the currency of Linden dollars will have a seamless extension into real world financial transactions. Already today, persons can exchange Linden dollars for real dollars and vice versus, minus a nominal fee. This idea of digital money has already been adopted mainstream and PayPal is a testament of our acceptance. Persons pay bills, the rent and other commodities with PayPal ‘dollars’. The natural extension of Second Life will be the same. Owe a friend a few bucks, then pay them some Linden dollars in-world.

Linden Lab should take warning. It would be a gross oversight to say that Linden Lab is a bank, but not treating their security as if they were a financial institution would be negligence.

Stronger Identity Mechanisms

As individuals and corporations become more immersed and reliant upon virtual worlds, the basic username and password pair will be insufficient. The RPG may be just a hobby for some, but its real business for others. Anshe Chung, the first Second Life millionaire (IRL) along with thousands of other merchants sell land, commodities and services in-world. In more traditional gaming RPGs, such as AC and WoW, users take on a personal affinity for their online characters. SouthPark’s portrayal of the addiction to WoW was humorous because of the truths it mirrored. The time spent to work your character to a 60 Rogue is real money. Not to mention the extensive after market dealings on EBay of character selling. Publishers of these online worlds will need to adopt stronger authentication and authorization mechanisms that online shoppers have come to request and respect.

You can look forward to more of my security ramblings in 2007. Enjoy a safe and happy new year.

--S