I have a simple website with a little game in it. It has a basic scoreboard using express - every time you die the website send a post request to the server with your score and the server adds it to the leaderboard. My problem is that its very simple for the leaderboard to be exploited. through devtools people can easily just:

• disable the colliders so they cant die and then turning it back on when they are happy with the score
• straight up just set the score to what ever value they want
• use the console to send a post request of their own with a score of their choice

I thought about creating a server side score counter and collision checker but my game is fast paced so I think this would be problematic, not talking about the computing power that it would put on the server if multiple people play at the same time.

Is this really the only solution or are there simpler solutions I'm not thinking of?

server code:

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const fs = require('fs');

const { json } = require('express');

app.use(express.json());
app.use(express.urlencoded({extended:true}));
app.use(express.static('Build'))

app.get('/leaderBoard', (req,res)=>{
    var rawData = fs.readFileSync('./database.json');
    var data = JSON.parse(rawData);
    res.json(data);
})

app.post('/leaderBoard', (req, res)=>{
    var rawData = fs.readFileSync('./database.json');
    var leaderBoard = JSON.parse(rawData).leaderBoard;

    for(var i = 0; i < leaderBoard.length; i++){
        if(req.body.score > leaderBoard[i].score){
            for(let i2 = leaderBoard.length -1; i2 > i; i2--)
                leaderBoard[i2] = leaderBoard[i2-1];
            
            leaderBoard[i] = req.body;
            break;
        }
    }

    fs.writeFileSync("./database.json",JSON.stringify({leaderBoard},null,2));
})

app.listen(process.env.PORT || 3000);