&gt; ...if some artifact within your game costs $20K+ of real-world dollars – you should start thinking about [encryption] seriously. In these cases, game account becomes as important as (and for quite a few people out there – much more important than) a bank account. Which carries all the security implications of the bank, including (but not limited to) encryption.<p>Sorry to nitpick but UDP seems like the wrong protocol for authentication. TCP is connection oriented. It&#x27;s a better choice for logging in, refreshing a server list or any transaction where reliability is more important than latency. Most online multiplayer games use both TCP and UDP for this reason.<p>As for encryption, of course you should always use it when transmitting sensitive data. For a game where the client has no control over the state of the world and all packets are at the discretion of the server (`move here`, `click that`, etc.), encryption might be overkill. The source port value (first 16 bits of a UDP packet) can be used to identify the source of a packet and associate it with a client&#x27;s server side session. But I&#x27;m not saying that encryption is a bad idea (it never is); it just depends on how much you can afford.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Datagram_Transport_Layer_Security" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Datagram_Transport_Layer_Secur...</a>