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Riot Games newest title “Valorant” installs kernel driver to run anti-cheat
- rndmize 7y agoI saw one of the threads on reddit about this yesterday with the usual litany of privacy/security complaints and had a random idea - make it optional. Put people that decide to remove it in an alternate queue with server-side anti-cheat mechanisms only, maybe disable competitive/ranked game types for them.
- floatingatoll 7y agoThey would use cheats to tell the server that they aren't cheating, to get placed into the "not cheating" queue.
- brianwawok 7y agoAs long as they tell you, great. Cheating really ruins online games for many of us.
- Operyl 7y agoThey flat out mention that they have an anti-cheat, but not that it's a kernel driver (most likely because the vast majority of users don't know what it is). They said you need to reboot. So, to me, I assumed it was a kernel driver of some sort. EDIT: Official comments from Riot: https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/fzxdl7/anticheat_starts_upon_computer_boot/fn6yqbe/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/fzxdl7/anticheat_... They mention they've had multiple external audits of the driver code.
- izzydata 7y agoI agree that they should definitely inform you of the extent of the anti-cheat system. I have never been able to take online gaming seriously due to how easy it is to cheat and how many people there are in the world that simply don't care about ruining others experience. Until it is impossible to cheat it will always be a casual experience only. Maybe this is what it takes to actually prevent cheaters, but I doubt it. It's an arms race and they will always find a way around it.
- brianwawok 7y agoIt's better to try vs do nothing. The solutions to all arms races is not just do nothing.
- izzydata 7y agoI'm not suggesting not trying. I'm just saying this won't be the final nail in the coffin for cheating.
- xboxnolifes 7y agoThere will never be a final nail. It's a game of cat and mouse.
- brianwawok 7y agoIt's a nail.
- bytematic 7y agoI agree, as a competitive fps player, I welcome this. Cheating was so bad in CSGO that people made a whole business running custom servers and private anti-cheat. They took the advanced steps that Valve wouldn't.
- twomoretime 7y agoDoesn't Player Unknown's Battlegrounds (aka pubg) do the same, but as a Chinese company? I stopped playing when they started forcing you to install something so intrusive.
- ssimpson 7y agoRiot is owned by Tencent, a Chinese company.
- superkuh 7y agoPUBG is owned by Tencent too.
- jasonlotito 7y agoCitation needed that PUBG Corp or Bluehole is 100% owned by Tencent.
- superkuh 7y agoOkay. I guess not everyone played PUBG like I did from the start and paid attention to these things. Just look at the Bluehole wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluehole_%28company%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluehole_%28company%29 . Here's an excerpt for you showing they have a strong if not completely controlling ownership. >In August 2017, Chinese holding company Tencent announced that it had, following a rejected acquisition bid, invested an undisclosed amount of money into Bluehole.[4] Bluehole initially denied that any investment had been made,[5] but later stated that they were in talks with Tencent in multiple partnerships, including the acquisition of an equity stake in Bluehole by Tencent.[6] Subsequently, Tencent acquired 1.5% of Bluehole for a total of ₩70 billion.[7] Tencent reaffirmed their intents to fully acquire Bluehole in November 2017.[8][9] Korean magazine The Korea Times suggested that an initial public offering, through which Bluehole would become a public company, was "out of question" due to Chang Byung-gyu's position as chairman of both Bluehole and the Fourth Industrial Revolution committee.[10] At the time, 38 Communications, a company that tracks unlisted Korean stocks, valued the company at ₩5.2 trillion.[11][12] Tencent plans to invest further ₩500 billion to acquire further 10% ownership, raising their total stake to 11.5%[13] Through the acquisition, Tencent is set to become Bluehole's second-largest single shareholder, following Chang Byung-gyu, Bluehole's founder and chairman, who owns 20.6% of the company.[14]
- 1tCKV3QfIo 7y agoImplying this will catch hypervisor based cheats.
- fulafel 7y agoWhy do consumers allow games to install these kind of kernel drivers? Are they aware they are giving away keys to the kindom wrt the OS/computing environment integrity just so game studios can take part in an unwinnable cat and mouse chase with cheaters? Also why does Microsoft or AV products allow this without giant "you are giving away root on your box" warning signs?
- hombre_fatal 7y agoPeople don't know what a kernel driver is nor what root access is nor what it entails. I don't think the installer even mentions it, either. They just want to play the dang game. Remember when Vista launched with that UAC prompt and people just googled how to perma-disable it? Also, cheating really is so bad that most people will accept it anyways. Unfortunately we don't have a software nor user culture of, for example, having an isolated partition for our important files and an isolated partition for "I just want to play some games" -- You can imagine how streamlined and effortless and by-default this could be in an alternate universe where it was a top priority. So people can really get hosed under catastrophic conditions like the anti-cheat becoming a remote backdoor for an attacker. I think this is really where people are let down by modern computing.
- BoorishBears 7y ago> Also, cheating really is so bad that most people will accept it anyways. I feel this is the part people miss. It's true that it's a cat and mouse game and these end up still being worked around, but cheating has crippled games before. Search any popular game + "cheaters" and find thousands of posts complaining about these people. Even if you explain this stuff to people, and admit it's still not foolproof, they will embrace it. I think we see this mistake a lot in the tech bubble. People assume if only people knew their data was being used they'd be outraged, except if you give them a choice between that and paying for stuff they'll always take giving away their data. People just don't care that much about the digital "realm". Their online presence, their "digital rights", to them it's all ethereal and a lot of the few who are even aware of this stuff assume the fight is lost anyways, further whittling down the number of people who care.
- lordleft 7y agoDidn't the infamous SecurOM also do this?
- aeyes 7y agoYou can find a lot of examples in the copy protection space, other examples are Starforce or the Sony rootkit. None of that came without problems for the users...
- mbesto 7y agoDid anyone in this HN comment section actually read the discussion on Reddit? According to the devs you can delete the executable if you're really that worried. They also talk about in more detail here: https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-null-anti-cheat-kernel-driver/ https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-null-anti-...
- davrosthedalek 7y agoThis is straight up funny, and I think well written, with good detail for the target demographic.
- invokestatic 7y agoI work in game anti-cheat, kernel drivers are a necessary evil. If I had a choice, I would stick to usermode or even server-side only. But you would be shocked how advanced some cheating software is, exploiting every aspect of the CPU. Now it is commonplace for a cheat to use a custom-made VM hypervisor or even a UEFI bootkit — crazy! Good luck stopping that from usermode.
- grawprog 7y ago>kernel drivers are a necessary evil. No they're not. Not for cheating in a video game. The reason why cheat makers have advanced to shady rootkit level exploits is because game publishers started doing it first. Stopping cheating in your games is not more important than the security of my computer period. I don't care. Find better ways to manage your game or i'll play something else. I have no interest in your anti-cheat spyware being on my computer.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Kiro 7y ago> Find better ways to manage your game or i'll play something else. Pretty sure game companies don't care about the small minority who cares or even understands the implications of this.
- invokestatic 7y agoI would disagree with your reason cheats went kernel, speaking as someone wrote cheats for over 10 years before “switching sides”. It’s because cheat software always wants to hide from the anti-cheat, and kernel mode provides a perfect place to do that. But if you don’t want to have anti-cheat software installed, that’s OK! I’m a big proponent of informed-consent, and if you don’t consent, nobody is forcing you to. You just won’t be able to enjoy online multiplayer.
- grawprog 7y ago>You just won’t be able to enjoy online multiplayer No, i'll be able to enjoy online multiplayer in one of the many, many games whose devs don't feel like they need to monitor and control my computer to provide a quality game.
- dr-detroit 7y agosystemd. drops the mic
- dx87 7y agoThere's also a thread on /r/pcgaming about the anti-cheat causing performance issues in other games, even though Riot says it only runs when Valorant is running.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y agoThis is unfortunately why I switch to console exclusively for gaming. I personally prefer a powerful PC especially with keyboard and mouse, but it’s just so much harder to cheat on a console nowadays, and I don’t want to install this stuff.
- plopz 7y agoYou don't even need to cheat on consoles, most games come built in with it, I think they call it aim assist. Or you can just use a keyboard and mouse and suddenly your better than all the controller users.
- recursive 7y ago"Cheating" in video games is generally understood to mean using a technical means to gain an advantage not intended by the developers. So it's not that.
- plopz 7y agoThe console players I know seem to consider mouse and keyboard cheating.
- floatingatoll 7y agoAim assist doesn't let you violate the in-game mechanic rules to generate impossible events over the wire to other players. Most PC games are vulnerable to this. Most console games aren't. Its quite refreshing that the worst cheating I've seen in 5 years has been artificially-induced network lag.
- hiccuphippo 7y agoConsole games have a low-tech cheating mechanism known as a Lag Switch, basically a switch that will disconnect the cheater for ~3 seconds. Here's one around the 1:35 mark and he tests it at around 4:00 https://youtu.be/iXUmhGruPRo https://youtu.be/iXUmhGruPRo
- chaostheory 7y agoThis is why I have a PC dedicated only to gaming and other machines dedicated only for casual web browsing. There's too much maintenance for a PC if it's multi-use.
- aeyes 7y agoIf this driver is so minimal that it is nothing more but an interface to userspace, opening the source would benefit everybody. It really means nothing when a company audits itself.
- invokestatic 7y agoIf they open-sourced it, cheaters could fork it and completely neuter the anti-cheat functionality.
- magnetic 7y agoAren't they going to do that even if it's not open source? (I mean, patch the binary)
- invokestatic 7y agoYou can detect binary patching. You can’t really detect patching if they have control over the whole source.
- miscPerson 7y agoThat doesn’t sound right. Can you describe a method of detecting binary patching that wouldn’t also detect a changed fork being compiled?
- mabbo 7y agoSecurity through obscurity isn't good security. The cheat writers won't be stopped just because they don't have the source. And with open source, the vulnerabilities it has can be found and fixed by everyone.
- swinglock 7y agoIt's all about obscurity when dealing with this type of malware. They are advanced rootkits used by malicious users tampering with distributed systems that must trust the client to a high degree or they simply will not work. As soon as obscurity is used by either side it inevitably becomes the tool both sides are forced to use.
- floatingatoll 7y agoPreviously on HN (2 months ago, 111 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22230168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22230168
- wayneftw 7y agoHow long before cheaters can buy a specialized robot/deep learning machine that has a high speed camera and servos that they can point at their computer screen where it can watch the screen and work the keyboard and mouse for them? (Or, better yet, the robot plugs into USB providing it's own keyboard/mouse/controller input and video output is recorded via a simple VGA or HDMI...) I think these physical types of cheating systems already exist for smartphones. Last time I mentioned it, some people hinted at systems you can setup for phones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21991775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21991775. Perhaps we're just waiting on the right software for this type of revolution to occur in PC gaming. I can't think of what's lacking right now though - all the pieces seem to be in place.
- floatingatoll 7y agoIt’s impossible to stop someone who can build robotic hands, but it’s still worth stopping cheap/easy software and hardware cheats.
- ThrowawayR2 7y agoThe blocking factor for that scenario is that the hardware to do that kind of cheating isn't cheap enough that the majority of cheaters can afford it. Get it below maybe $100 or so and then it would become a real problem.
- rasz 7y agoWould be trivial for less graphically cluttered games. Your external cheat could run a copy of a game engine constantly matching player position/orientation and comparing rendering of empty map to video feed from low latency capture card. Simple visual diff is all it takes to identify even 1 pixel of enemy peeking from around the corner. You could inject visual overlay on top of external video signal and auto trigger mouse click when crosshair points at potential differences. No fancy AI/deep learning required.
- floatingatoll 7y agoIt would be cheaper to hire a gig worker to play the game for you, which is how we ended up with RMT farming as an industry in the first place. Why develop a robot when a human will do, more cheaply and with less fuss?