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A sandbox can be a virtual machine, for all practical purposes indistinguishable from any "normal" computers ordinary players use. Of course this will lead to t
by drdaeman 8y ago
A sandbox can be a virtual machine, for all practical purposes indistinguishable from any "normal" computers ordinary players use. Of course this will lead to the never ending Ouroboros of more sophisticated detectors and more sophisticated virtualization, ad infinitum.
I've heard there are cheats that use hypervisors to stand above the operating systems and avoid kernel-level anti-cheats. I wouldn't be too surprised to learn about cheats that sit on a bus and use DMA to peek into anything they please (subject to the memory protections of IOMMU - again, this war doesn't seem to have an end) - they're probably impractical but not something that couldn't exist.
- bitexploder 8y agoHah. Are you me? That is what I always call the cat and mouse of cheat / anti cheat. (An Ouroboros) :-D
- drdaeman 8y agoI've just read your comment above and then quoted you without the proper credit ;) Liked the naming.
- bitexploder 8y agoAhh, well thanks :)
- infogulch 8y agoI never claimed that this would be perfect. All security, especially the kind we're talking about here and the kind mentioned in the fine article is about the relative effort that the developer and cheater has to do to create the obsfucation and work around it, respectively. Making debugging harder doesn't make debugging impossible, it makes it more difficult and take more time. Adding random cheat checks on every rebuild doesn't make it impossible to find and remove them, just takes more effort and time. I.e. how much time investment do the developers have to put into making the workaround vs how much effort it takes the cheater. I'm just saying this could be a relatively low effort on the part of the developers to create and a relatively huge effort on the part of cheaters to work around.
- drdaeman 8y agoI really want to believe all this effort better be spent into fixing cheating. Either by tweaking game mechanics so cheating provides no meaningful gain (and just gets boring) or by tweaking other participating nodes (servers or other clients) into not accepting situations that should be impossible. I don't know anything about LoL, though.
- infogulch 8y agoThe article goes over all of these things, and LoL already goes to many lengths to invalidate as much cheating as possible. Their servers already don't trust data sent over the network and verify it independently, they already don't send information to a client that it doesn't currently require to render the frame, like the hidden locations of enemies, they're simply not sent so "map hacking" is literally impossible. The article has lots more details, I would recommend it.