When dealing cards over the internet, is it better to distribute seed values or actual objects?
<p>I am working on a spades game that connects players over the internet, but I don't know how I should distribute the cards to players:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>If I send the seed values for the SecureRandom object used for shuffling to each player, they could theoretically sniff their own traffic for the values and look at the source code to create their own program that deals the cards similarly;</p></li>
<li><p>But if I use the dealer-player's machine to deal the cards and send them to the other players, the dealer could theoretically cheat.</p></li>
</ul>

<p>Sending seed values would decrease the amount of data sent over the internet, but sending the actual cards would seem to make it harder to cheat. I've thought about making my own trusted third-party server that the dealer-player would send their seed values to and would send the cards to the other players, but that would require setting up an EC2 instance and I have no idea how to even begin to do that.</p>

<p>Or am I overthinking this a bit?</p>
