4 ms·

It's none of the game's business what other software my computer is running. These checks have in the past been notoriously buggy, and can interfere with other

It's none of the game's business what other software my computer is running. These checks have in the past been notoriously buggy, and can interfere with other operations. This kind of crud is what remote attestation is for, and Microsoft should be responsible for developing it, not every different gaming company competing with each other for kernel access.

invokestatic 6y ago
Fwiw, my solution does actually take advantage of remote attestation, and if that is validated, a large part of kernel integrity checks are skipped. The problem is that many “gaming” consumer motherboards don’t ship with TPMv2 or secure boot, and we still have to support those computers.
- devwastaken 6y ago
  How does tpm or secureboot assist in anti cheat?
  - invokestatic 6y ago
    When you can remotely prove that the entire boot chain has not been tampered with, it’s much harder to load cheat software in the kernel layer. Of course, still possible, just harder and easier to detect.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - google234123 6y ago
      How does this address the fact that windows has 100s of badly written drivers that allow r/w to kernel? This seems to only stop the most advance cheats that actually execute at or before boot.
      - invokestatic 6y ago
        Secure boot addresses other specific security concerns that are unrelated to exploitable drivers. For instance, it eliminates a whole class of PatchGuard bypasses.
        kortilla 6y ago
        Sorry to derail, but how often does anti-cheat development involve buying access to a cheat just for the purpose of reverse engineering it? Is that pretty much most of the time or is there enough evidence collected from logs to be able to infer what was happening?
        dylz 6y ago
        Not parent, but have seen this before, or some competitor/pissed off outed person/partner in crime/etc hands it to anticheat team. Private cheats usually require being vouched in, sometimes with ID scans, sometimes physically shipping you hardware.
        invokestatic 6y ago
        This is largely dependent on the passive collection capabilities of a particular anti-cheat. Sometimes getting a copy is useful to just to make 100% sure the detection you wrote works as intended. Sometimes it's because the techniques used are novel. Most anti-cheat vendors do this.
- ajnin 6y ago
  I understand that, fundamentally, anti-cheat involves taking some form of control away from the player. But when the solution involves deeply embedded hardware modules that take that control away globally, introducing their own host of problems, I think that goes too far, and the cure might be worse than the disease. As a player, I wish there was a way to make sure that the anti-cheat only runs when the game runs, and only checks stuff related to the game and nothing else.
Spivak 6y ago
> It's none of the game's business what other software my computer is running. I get the sentiment here but we're specifically talking about a mechanism specifically designed to detect other software that is used for cheating. The alternative is a world where games will only run on machines with SecureBoot, a signed kernel with kernel security on, and only whitelisted signed modules. There isn't a good solution for how to run games where the clients have to be semi-trusted on a hardware and software stack controlled by the user. If you give me total control over the environment in which a program runs I can make it do and believe anything.
- eptcyka 6y ago
  Maybe the game servers could not send the whole game state to each client and validate input it receives from each client? Banning blatant aimbots is just a pure statistics thing. Also, you could just train ai to detect patterns of cheating via an adversarial model where you pit normal ai against ai that uses the cheats you currently detect via rootkits. Games should not be part of my ring 0.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    > Banning blatant aimbots is just a pure statistics thing. So you have two choices here. You either ban the best players or the aim bots just behave with a success rate close to the best players.
    - krageon 6y ago
      If a player consistently has a sub 100ms response time, it is a bot. There are plenty such values to be found that have clear superhuman markers (100ms on average is already realistically too low, so I'm being mild), and you can use those to detect cheaters.
    - eptcyka 6y ago
      If you can't distinguish between cheaters and the best players statistically, can the regular players tell the difference? Does it matter at all then? And when I'm talking about statistics here, I'm not referring to the kill/death ratio, but rather all input data received from a cheater.
m-p-3 6y ago
I agree, but at some point you have to decide if the tradeoff between the freedom to run whatever you want is worth the invasiveness of having an anticheat software analysing your system in-depth for cheating softwares is worth it. In a way, it's true that it's none of their business which softwares you use, but it's also their business to make sure the multiplayer experience is fair for the entire userbase. I guess that's the beauty of games consoles, where the execution of softwares is tightly controlled to minimize piracy and cheaters.
- adambyrtek 6y ago
  Maybe that trade-off should be more flexible and dependent on the "league" a given player wants to play in. The criteria could be more strict for the "pros" where cheating can lead to significant gains, like professional athletes who have to pass regular anti-doping tests, but you wouldn't expect the same invasive checks from (for example) people participating in a charity run.
  - tapoxi 6y ago
    Historically this is what game developers did, and the servers without anti-cheat enabled were rife with cheating. When games switched from server browsers to matchmaking, they just defaulted to using the anti-cheat system.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    The problem with your idea is that nobody wants to play with cheaters. Everything that makes the game fun is defeated by a single cheater. So people are just going to choose between playing with 0 cheaters or go play a different game.
    - adambyrtek 6y ago
      Good point, I haven't played games much since the late 90s and I'm returning to gaming only now (partially thanks to Proton), so my experience with multi-player is based mostly on modem or LAN parties with friends, where the social aspect helped to prevent cheating. I guess it's very different now when you can play with random people on the other side of the world.
google234123 6y ago
It's the game'd business what you are running if you are ruining the game for other players.
pkaye 6y ago
What if they gave you the ability to disable anti-cheat checks but put you up against others who do the same?
- rkangel 6y ago
  I play various games where they developers try hard to prevent cheaters and they still get through and ruin a small but significant percentage of the games. I can't imagine how crappy an experience it would be if there was no cheat protection at all.

invokestatic 6y ago

Fwiw, my solution does actually take advantage of remote attestation, and if that is validated, a large part of kernel integrity checks are skipped. The problem is that many “gaming” consumer motherboards don’t ship with TPMv2 or secure boot, and we still have to support those computers.

devwastaken 6y ago
How does tpm or secureboot assist in anti cheat?
- invokestatic 6y ago
  When you can remotely prove that the entire boot chain has not been tampered with, it’s much harder to load cheat software in the kernel layer. Of course, still possible, just harder and easier to detect.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - google234123 6y ago
    How does this address the fact that windows has 100s of badly written drivers that allow r/w to kernel? This seems to only stop the most advance cheats that actually execute at or before boot.
    - invokestatic 6y ago
      Secure boot addresses other specific security concerns that are unrelated to exploitable drivers. For instance, it eliminates a whole class of PatchGuard bypasses.
      - kortilla 6y ago
        Sorry to derail, but how often does anti-cheat development involve buying access to a cheat just for the purpose of reverse engineering it? Is that pretty much most of the time or is there enough evidence collected from logs to be able to infer what was happening?
        dylz 6y ago
        Not parent, but have seen this before, or some competitor/pissed off outed person/partner in crime/etc hands it to anticheat team. Private cheats usually require being vouched in, sometimes with ID scans, sometimes physically shipping you hardware.
        invokestatic 6y ago
        This is largely dependent on the passive collection capabilities of a particular anti-cheat. Sometimes getting a copy is useful to just to make 100% sure the detection you wrote works as intended. Sometimes it's because the techniques used are novel. Most anti-cheat vendors do this.
ajnin 6y ago
I understand that, fundamentally, anti-cheat involves taking some form of control away from the player. But when the solution involves deeply embedded hardware modules that take that control away globally, introducing their own host of problems, I think that goes too far, and the cure might be worse than the disease. As a player, I wish there was a way to make sure that the anti-cheat only runs when the game runs, and only checks stuff related to the game and nothing else.

Spivak 6y ago

> It's none of the game's business what other software my computer is running. I get the sentiment here but we're specifically talking about a mechanism specifically designed to detect other software that is used for cheating. The alternative is a world where games will only run on machines with SecureBoot, a signed kernel with kernel security on, and only whitelisted signed modules. There isn't a good solution for how to run games where the clients have to be semi-trusted on a hardware and software stack controlled by the user. If you give me total control over the environment in which a program runs I can make it do and believe anything.

eptcyka 6y ago
Maybe the game servers could not send the whole game state to each client and validate input it receives from each client? Banning blatant aimbots is just a pure statistics thing. Also, you could just train ai to detect patterns of cheating via an adversarial model where you pit normal ai against ai that uses the cheats you currently detect via rootkits. Games should not be part of my ring 0.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > Banning blatant aimbots is just a pure statistics thing. So you have two choices here. You either ban the best players or the aim bots just behave with a success rate close to the best players.
  - krageon 6y ago
    If a player consistently has a sub 100ms response time, it is a bot. There are plenty such values to be found that have clear superhuman markers (100ms on average is already realistically too low, so I'm being mild), and you can use those to detect cheaters.
  - eptcyka 6y ago
    If you can't distinguish between cheaters and the best players statistically, can the regular players tell the difference? Does it matter at all then? And when I'm talking about statistics here, I'm not referring to the kill/death ratio, but rather all input data received from a cheater.

m-p-3 6y ago

I agree, but at some point you have to decide if the tradeoff between the freedom to run whatever you want is worth the invasiveness of having an anticheat software analysing your system in-depth for cheating softwares is worth it. In a way, it's true that it's none of their business which softwares you use, but it's also their business to make sure the multiplayer experience is fair for the entire userbase. I guess that's the beauty of games consoles, where the execution of softwares is tightly controlled to minimize piracy and cheaters.

adambyrtek 6y ago
Maybe that trade-off should be more flexible and dependent on the "league" a given player wants to play in. The criteria could be more strict for the "pros" where cheating can lead to significant gains, like professional athletes who have to pass regular anti-doping tests, but you wouldn't expect the same invasive checks from (for example) people participating in a charity run.
- tapoxi 6y ago
  Historically this is what game developers did, and the servers without anti-cheat enabled were rife with cheating. When games switched from server browsers to matchmaking, they just defaulted to using the anti-cheat system.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  The problem with your idea is that nobody wants to play with cheaters. Everything that makes the game fun is defeated by a single cheater. So people are just going to choose between playing with 0 cheaters or go play a different game.
  - adambyrtek 6y ago
    Good point, I haven't played games much since the late 90s and I'm returning to gaming only now (partially thanks to Proton), so my experience with multi-player is based mostly on modem or LAN parties with friends, where the social aspect helped to prevent cheating. I guess it's very different now when you can play with random people on the other side of the world.

google234123 6y ago

It's the game'd business what you are running if you are ruining the game for other players.

pkaye 6y ago

What if they gave you the ability to disable anti-cheat checks but put you up against others who do the same?

rkangel 6y ago
I play various games where they developers try hard to prevent cheaters and they still get through and ruin a small but significant percentage of the games. I can't imagine how crappy an experience it would be if there was no cheat protection at all.