14 ms·

Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse

179 points by tarunupaday 5y ago

octupus 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22856228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22856228 Someone had predicted this.
f311a 5y ago
There are cheats that read the RAM via DMA device, so there is no need to use video signal. They also modify mouse movements via RPI kit that injects between the mouse and PC.
- hnick 5y ago
  Depending on the game, cheats can be a packet sniffing proxy. It won't even be on the gaming device.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nzmsv 5y ago
One may wonder what exactly is the point in a human watching this auto-playing game system, and whether they'd be better off watching a movie... But another way to look at it is as a preview of the future. Just picture this: a world of machines battling it out for supremacy, and somewhere off to the side there is an almost forgotten human brain. It seems to serve no discernible purpose, and yet it is actually the reason all the machines exist. What they are actually fighting to optimize, unbeknownst to them, is the dopamine release into a primate brain. Bonus points if the brain itself is a simulation :)
- smolder 5y ago
  Cheats are about two things: money or prestige. People want to get back at the players who so rudely beat them normally, and get high competitive rankings that make them look better than other players in that games community. Or, they use the cheats to create high ranking game accounts to sell to players who want to look good, or they simply cheat to win prize money. It should go without saying that this kind of activity destroys the interest in games affected by it. People don't like playing against superhuman enemies and having their progress impeded by it. It doesn't make sense that it would be enjoyable to play except that you can enjoy making money or making other people feel bad.
  - nzmsv 5y ago
    That's exactly what I meant by my "preview of the future" comment. Imagine the same scenario, but in a higher-stakes environment than playing a game. Let's imagine there is a "leetcode aug" that lets one instantly pattern-match a problem and pumps a perfect solution into one's brain. That doesn't have to be very sophisticated AI. But once this kind of augmentation is available, the pressure is on for everyone to get it, or for the tech to be banned, or for the evaluation criteria to change.
  - RHSeeger 5y ago
    > money or prestige Or accomplishment. Some people cheat just to accomplish something.
    - fdhfdjkfhdkj 5y ago
      Or just to watch the world burn...
    - frobozz 5y ago
      Not really, because if they cheated, they didn't actually accomplish it. They cheat to gain the prestige of having accomplished it.
      - watwut 5y ago
        No. They still feel accomplished. It is self deception, but many people are good at double thing. The sense of accomplishment comes from beating someone for many people. Cheats dont change that.
      - RHSeeger 5y ago
        This is incorrect. It is entirely possible to cheat and feel a sense of accomplishment. - You can cheat to finish a game and still enjoy the fact that you finished the parts that you didn't need to cheat by. - You can figure out how to cheat the game (ie, hex editing) yourself, and get a sense of accomplishment from that. It is entirely possible to both cheat at a game and have a sense of accomplishment related to that game. Just because it isn't something _you_ would do, doesn't mean it isn't true for others. Personally, I spent days mapping out the save file for Bard's Tale back in the day and manipulating it to my heart's content. It was fun, and I enjoyed it.
- rantwasp 5y ago
  yeah no. A machine does not have motivation. It does not have urges and desires. It may solve a problem perfectly buy it’s gonna be a while until they can grok why solving problems is worthwhile to begin with.
  - nzmsv 5y ago
    That's the point: the AI in my imaginary world doesn't need desires. The human brain is acting as a "desire coprocessor".
    - rolleiflex 5y ago
      This is such an underrated idea. It is possible that at the logical conclusion of the current trend of machines getting better at previously human-only things, it might turn out that all we can really do that a machine cannot, is to want things. I don’t know if that is better than the alternative ending, but it’s something to think about.
      - pmontra 5y ago
        It started a long ago. I want to go to the sea and my car brings me there faster than I could if I walked. Actually, I'd never been at the sea if there were no machines (trains first). But the train, the car, the AI are only tools. Not much different than a knife or its first ancestors, the flint shards.
        imtringued 5y ago
        Interesting, machines (and technically all human creation) not only fulfill desires, they also create them.
- mwcremer 5y ago
  Asimov had a thought about machines battling for supremacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
- 0-_-0 5y ago
  Actually, it might be a good idea to instead of banning cheaters just put them on the same server to play each other without telling them.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Create a super human rank that is so extremely difficult to achieve that only bots can compete there. The next problem is that cheaters may decide to cheat 100% in one match and 0% in the other until they hit human ranks again. You'd have to write the scoring algorithm in a way that weights performance within individual games higher than average performance over multiple games. If cheaters insist on fighting human players they must lower the performance of their cheats to a human level. This allows people to cheat up to any rank they want but from the perspective of other players the game is still fair.
- ithkuil 5y ago
  Said primates have a dopamine down if they realize their life has no meaning, so the AI must provide them some meaning (illusion) so that they get back to the desired dopamine levels EDIT: for example by pretending they are just crappy machines and they need a human to be really good at doing things EDIT2: oh too much snow, I can't drive, please human help me out!
pmorici 5y ago
I was thinking about this the other day when I saw a YouTube Warzone stream lament that the game didn't have an anti-cheat system on the end users machine. I do wonder about the claim that it is undetectable though since a machine will be flawless where as even the best human players make mistakes.
- detaro 5y ago
  a good cheat will make mistakes if thats needed to look like a good human.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  I stopped playing war zone due to the amount of cheaters. Most of the streamers cheat too and it’s sad. It can be a lot of fun to play but it’s like counter strike back in the day when it got over run by cheaters until valve started auto detecting them. There’s videos of a popular streamer called symphony or something where he’s shooting people through walls or sniping people when zoomed in that aren’t even visible. Then jokes “oh someone will call me a cheater”
- denimnerd42 5y ago
  I think it's currently impossible to detect. I think it would be possible to detect if you used some kind of player profile where you characterized how a player moved and then were able to determine through a replay whether the profiles matched. However then you could program the cheat AI to mimic the real player etc, etc. But this would take several evolutions where each tech would be ahead of the other.
  - kilburn 5y ago
    I think you are spot on: statistical player profiling + controlled environment testing is the good and potentially permanent solution to this problem. In my vision every game creates a model of your behavior/capabilities (server-side). For example, in a fps game it could consider your reaction times, overshoot distance on quick movements, look-around frequency, movement patterns, etc.. When you reach certain level you must certify yourself. That is, you must go to an actual physical location and play in a controlled environment. If your behavior there matches your model you get certified for that level of play and can keep going. If you don't... you get banned. Of course the model would track your progress and ask/force you to re-certify as you keep improving/reach the limits of your current certification. Would this eliminate all cheats? Probably not. However, since you can't play outside of the standard deviation of your controlled-environment capabilities, I would argue that it doesn't matter anymore. To a honest player a cheater would look like "a player having a good day" (which is something that happens and you need to deal with anyway) instead of looking like "a player with superhuman capabilities". The problem with this approach is how to build such controlled-environment certification centers and procedures. This is a big task, but also a big opportunity. It is not that much different from examination centers that already exist in the learning/certification industry. Furthermore, since gaming is such a huge market (and growing) and certification centers don't need to be tied to specific games (they can be a service that games hire and people pay for) the whole ordeal seems doable. So doable in fact that I could see myself investing in a startup having this goal.
okwubodu 5y ago
This is close to my ideal way of avoiding a runaway Ultron/Skynet-type AI scenario: airgap it and force the use of a physical mouse, monitor, and keyboard to interact with the outside world. At least once it reaches Twitter we can stop it before it destroys humanity one robotic keystroke at a time.
- coolspot 5y ago
  Connection to the world only through mouse/keyboard won’t stop AGI that is smarter and more productive than any hacker team in the world. It will type it’s own source code (but better) into a hacked TPU/GPU/whatever cluster using a keyboard and vim, no problem.
  - Buttons840 5y ago
    Yeah, but we don't really need to worry until it starts using Emacs.
- jtsiskin 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box
denimnerd42 5y ago
I did something like this with Dota2 where I'd have it monitor the opposing team to save their locations when they appeared on the minimap in a shaded color on a 2nd monitor on that 2nd computer. I used an HDMI splitter and HDMI capture card to send the input to the second computer. I did the CV stuff with opencv library. Taking it a step further as shown in the article could be done to do stuff like auto creep killing vs human and stuff like that.
- ed25519FUUU 5y ago
  The meta game of “cheating” sounds way more fun to me than playing any of these games.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    Dota 2 is probably the most complex game I've ever personally played. It takes hundreds of hours of play just to learn the basics of the rules. There are over a hundred distinct hero characters to play, each with mostly unique skills. At a few hours per hero just to learn the essentials, it can be upwards of 500 hours before you even have a good idea of what's going on. Getting a feel for the overall flow of the game, where to be and where not to be, etc... can take thousands of hours. There is no sport and few other pre-computer competitive games that even approach this level of depth and complexity. But speaking of playing the meta-game more than the game, I had a ton of fun making a "hero picker". At the beginning of each match there's a mini-game where each of the ten players gets to choose their hero out of the available pool of 119. Some heroes combo well others on their own team, and others counter the enemy choices well. This leads to an explosion of possibilities, with something like 4e20 possible distinct combinations, so choosing well is... difficult. I downloaded the outcome of 30 million games (just a few days' worth!) and tried a bunch of ML/AI algorithms to come up with an optimal hero picker: Given 'n' current picks, choose the best hero for the nest pick. That produced high win rates but boring games: it just picked the overall strongest characters with very little variance. I then tried to make it pick the hero with the highest differential win rate. That is, it would sometimes recommend a hero that would decrease your chance of winning, but increase your chance for that hero relative to other games. This would give the opportunity to play weak heroes in games that suited them best. That was okay, but still not optimal, because it used the win rates from very bad players. I then took my 30M games, and produced an automatic chess-style ranking for all players. I threw away all "weird" games and players only seen a few times, giving me a clean learning set of regular players with a known skill set. I then filtered it to my personal ID number +/- a 10% skill range (still millions of games!) and trained the ML on that, hoping to give optimal recommendations for my own skill set. That was a good try, but it turned out that people in my skill range are terrible at the meta-game of picking heroes. I then threw up my hands and simply had the ML train on the top 10% of players. That was amazing! It was like having the knowledge of the best players distilled into an AI. It recommended some amazing combos, and generally stopped recommending heroes that are strong in the mid-tier "pub" games but weak against skilled opponents. My skill went up, and I slowly climbed the ranks to about the top 20% or so. Fun times, fun times...
modeless 5y ago
Even game streaming services like Stadia won't be immune to cheating with this kind of setup.
- dexterhaslem 5y ago
  well, ignoring the fact no one is doing competitive gaming on something with that horrible latency
narrator 5y ago
The irony is that real war with actual guns that kill people will likely have aimbots on small arms in the next decade.
- l33t2328 5y ago
  I’m afraid you’ve been watching too many movies. This tech isn’t close to deployment for an infantryman.
  - bserge 5y ago
    Should be, but what's the point of giving it to a human when it could be better used by a robot. I was amazed by this back then, there's probably better stuff by now: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/17000-linux-powered-rifle-brings-auto-aim-to-the-real-world/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/17000-linux-powered-...
  - s5300 5y ago
    Who needs infantrymen when you have suicide drone swarms, bunker busters, MIRV's, thermobaric weapons (vacuum bombs), instant retina frying laser disco drones... Infantry are going to be a thing of the past for anything more than proxy wars. Maybe frogmen will have their day or something. The future of human violence at scale is fucking terrifying. Edit: Oh, and how could I forget. Our lovely fucking sword deploying hellfire missiles https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/the-story-of-americas-hellfire-missile-full-of-swords/ https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/the-story-of-americas-hellfire-... This is where you insert the joke about studying the blade I think.
    - mattowen_uk 5y ago
      > Infantry are going to be a thing of the past for anything more than proxy wars. I disagree. The reason we still have millions of factory workers doing jobs a robot can do, is that the human is easily trained, and easily replaced, and very cheap to run. If the human breaks, you just replace it from the endless supply of other humans. Infantry[1] is the same. Take a gun, learn how to shoot it, run at the enemy. If the solider dies, just replace it with another one from the endless supply of humans. Robots on the other hand are very expensive to replace. Until we can auto-build Terminators[2] for less than the 'cost' of a human, robots will never replace people in low skill, high churn roles. --- [1] I'm not talking about proper specialist soldiers here, just the barely-trained cannon fodder. [2] ..and we all know how that turns out.
ALittleLight 5y ago
I wonder if the anti-cheat system could insert ghost enemies for a few frames, or about 20-30ms, fast enough that humans wouldn't really notice. If players are shooting too often at ghosts, that may be a good reason to ban.
- somebodythere 5y ago
  They could just modify the cheat to filter out enemies that appear for less than two frames .
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    True, but there would be a lag of days to weeks before the cheaters adapted. You could bust everyone in the mean time.
    - allendoerfer 5y ago
      Valve is actually doing that. Sometimes when they update VAC, they intentionally do not ban anyone for a while to catch as many as possible. Not unlike the police is handling drug dealers.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Sadly that would be game breaking, seeing an enemy for a frame can totally break your game-sense.
- rangewookie 5y ago
  20-30ms would be noticeable to a trained eye. Speedrunners often hit buttons frame perfect during a 1/30th or 1/60th second window. Many people today are playing on 120-240hz monitors. Additionally, if you're training on gameplay from X game and that game has theoretical ghost frames that the player doesn't see / shoot at, then the hack shouldn't shoot at it either. It's a bit of a chicken an egg problem.
  - lifeformed 5y ago
ajxs 5y ago
I played competitive level Quake 3/Quake Live for a number of years, during the height of its popularity. I also have friends who play more modern competitive FPS games, such as CS:GO. Even though QL was only a small online scene, the use aimbots, triggerbots, wallhacks, and similar tools was always very common at the competitive level. Quake Live had very limited anti-cheat functionality, so it was never relied upon for proving legitimacy. Despite this, cheaters generally didn't last long in competitive play before being banned. Even if the computer can't unequivocally identify the presence of these tools, skilled players could usually tell the difference. Even if skilled players couldn't tell by watching alone, other contextual factors usually gave hackers away. Such as lack of LAN experience, no history of natural skill progression, etc. I'm aware that this doesn't prove that we caught every hacker, just that we caught many of them. These cheat tools could apparently be tuned to give extremely subtle advantages to players. Still, over a long enough time period the tool would eventually do something inexplicable enough by normal beahviour to give the player away. I haven't exactly kept up with competitive FPS in years now, however it doesn't seem hard to make aimbots that work well, it seems very difficult though to make ones that consistently appear natural to a trained eye.
- artificialLimbs 5y ago
  Can confirm. I was playing Quake Live extremely well one day (for whatever reason??) and a couple of the guys specced me and announced that I, indeed, was not cheating. That led me to wonder how they knew and some searching turned up a few threads about various tools and tricks of the trade WRT that game specifically.
- _the_inflator 5y ago
  I side with you. Also being a pro-gamer in RTS years ago, I can relate. There are many small steps between n00b level and mastery and a lot has to come together to be at expert level in gaming. Usually experts can play in variable settings, cheaters only in one particular. Experts can adapt, while cheaters usually not. Usually real talk about how you handled and interpreted a certain situation will show the difference. Cheaters usually are not the most talkative. However sometimes there is a make or break in a certain game. While cheaters are usually spotted in the long run, it spoils almost every time the fun in the short run. Missed opportunities to tourney advancement, frustration etc. can make or break players. Are we talking about the true winner, Carl Lewis, in the 100m finals in Seoul in 1988 or Ben Johnson? I saw some guys with really good potential leaving out of frustration and that is really sad.
jay_kyburz 5y ago
"The only winning move it not to play." Game developers should stop trying to police this and let the bots fight each other. The game becomes, who can tune their bots better. Train the bots for team work or more strategic level play. In the meantime, the rest of us can just enjoy some co-op gaming against some easy bots, or play competitive matches against just friends and family. If some random person on your server is no fun to play again, just kick them. If you are really into the competitive gaming and want to take the games more seriously, I'd like to see players go meet other players face to face. Join a local league and play on hardware you don't own with other people watching. I used to love playing Quake down at the local internet cafe with a bunch of friends. We had a small 4v4 league going.
jamesgreenleaf 5y ago
The cheater's version of the halting problem.
- userbinator 5y ago
  I would say it's closer to a Turing test.
ehnto 5y ago
Cheating in the game "Warzone" has been a really interesting thing to watch unfold. It makes the game really frustrating to play and I have stopped playing it, but outside of that it's interesting to watch players, even high-visibility streamers, attempt to play without getting caught and succeeding at that. In Warzone the map is huge, and 150 players are split up in to competing squads of 1-4 players. So it becomes very much an information heavy game. Knowing where people are, even when they're hundreds of meters away, is extremely valuable, and that's one of the hacks people have. They see nametags, hitboxes and information for players overlaid on their screen. They also change colour based on if they're in line-of-sight, so you can say "I see that squad, but they can't shoot at me, so I am safe" and that's extremely valuable. Second to that, they can use aim-assist but the highest-end aimbots are really quite nuanced, and they allow you to smooth out the assisted movements and only auto-aim in specific scenarios, and that makes it really hard to tell they're using an aimbot. It just looks like a really good player. Gone are the "snap to head" aimbots of Counter Strike that were so obvious. You can report someone all-day-long and they may never get banned because the hack software is competent, and it's hard to demark the difference between "Knowledge you shouldn't be able to have" and "Intuition of a good player".
- voidnullnil 5y ago
  Aimbots were already using "smoothing" methods in the original CS. Snapping to headshot is more to piss people off.
userbinator 5y ago
This is basically the classic "analog hole." I remember over a decade ago doing something far less sophisticated to "cheat" in a turn-based projectile physics game --- I used a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomogram printed on transparency and just put it on the monitor to quickly calculate parameters between turns.
- jon-wood 5y ago
  At a LAN party a few years ago one of the games being played was Modern Warfare 2, a game where your gun is almost always going to hit in exactly the centre of the screen, but that’s made more difficult by requiring you to look down the sights to get an aim point, which slows you down. One of the people near me worked around that by taking a few shots down the sights and then sticking a blob of blue tack on his monitor where the shots hit, creating an instant targeting reticle available at all times.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    That’s an old trick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLHBGigq4zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLHBGigq4zk
aurelian15 5y ago
This is just one example of the "analogue hole" [1] problem shared by all anti-cheat/DRM systems. At least in theory, there is no technology that can prevent exploits like this short of dystopian levels of surveillance and locking down computing devices even further. By that I mean encrypted communication on all computer buses (including USB, HDMI), and only allowing access to those busses via physically hardened "secure" enclaves, up to (in the end game) big-brother-like surveillance (think electronic proctoring solutions). I think that this is exactly the problem with such DRM schemes---the ensuing cat-and-mouse game will inevitably lead to trampling the user's freedoms, because locking down computing devices and environments to ridiculous levels is the only way in which DRM can be made to work. Of course, for now, cheats like the one featured in the article should be fairly easy to detect (at least from what I've seen in the linked video). The motion of the bot is extremely jerky; a simple rule-based system, or, if you want to be fancy, a neural network based anomaly detection system should be able to detect this. On the side of the cheat authors, this could be easily circumvented if they include a "calibration phase", where user input trains a simple neural network to stochastically emulate the dynamics of the user's sensor-action loop. The cheat could then act slightly faster than the user, giving them an edge while still using their unique dynamics profile. I wonder where this will lead eventually, and I genuinely feel sorry for all the people who pour their heart and soul into competitive gaming; I don't think that this kind of cheating is something that can and should (see above) be prevented in the long-run. The best possible outcome I can imagine is that online gaming becomes more cooperative or once more converges back to small groups of people who know and trust each other. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole Edit: Spelling, grammar, and clarity
- rightbyte 5y ago
  LAN tournaments solve the problem, though. So it is not that bad.
- floatboth 5y ago
  > neural network based anomaly detection system Valve has already been doing that for a few years: https://www.pcgamer.com/vacnet-csgo/ https://www.pcgamer.com/vacnet-csgo/
- 5y ago
trhway 5y ago
sounds like a preview of a very close future of drone wars. The humans would just have no chances to participate effectively in such a fight.
riveducha 5y ago
I did this for the FPS game Valorant, not for cheating, but to see if I could make a 100% computer-controlled opponent.[1] It involved some weird Logitech mouse hacking for the control side of things and was overall really rough, especially with how much latency was involved. With a normal USB capture device, the latency is around 50-100ms, so it’s hard to do lightning-fast reaction. Even more so if your view is moving at the same time. Everything that normal aimbots do by directly accessing the game’s memory suddenly becomes much harder when you don’t have memory access. For anyone interested though, the computer vision models publicly available are both very good and also easy to fine-tune for a specific use case (e.g. a specific game). [1] https://riveducha.onfabrica.com/valorant-ai-pytorch-opencv-logitech https://riveducha.onfabrica.com/valorant-ai-pytorch-opencv-l...
the8472 5y ago
Funny, recently there were threads about anti-cheat rootkits where people argued they're justified because they provide some defense against cheaters who wouldn't be sophisticated enough to exploit the analog hole. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27640553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27640553
0xfaded 5y ago
Oh man, this brings back memories using SCAR as a kid to automate RuneScape. That was my gateway drug into computer vision.
mavhc 5y ago
If a game can be easily played by a computer maybe it's time to start playing a more complicated game, worthy of your human brain
- Timshel 5y ago
  Tell that to all the chess players ...
  - beardyw 5y ago
    Interesting that Alpha Zero, by playing itself, has come up with some new approaches which are feeding back into the professional game.
- blindmute 5y ago
  Name one game that a human is better at than a trained NN. Starcraft 2, chess, go, Dota 2, have all been shown that AI wins. If a game is digital, AI will win after sufficient modeling. I don't think any of that negates the merit of the games themselves for human play.
  - b0rsuk 5y ago
    Any 4X game.
    - blindmute 5y ago
      4X games are not especially complex, so I find it hard to believe they are an exception. More likely no one has bothered to train a good NN on that kind of game.
  - mavhc 5y ago
    Hacker News?
mondo3343 5y ago
This is the cheat tool the article refers to: https://www.userviz.com/index.html https://www.userviz.com/index.html
MacroChip 5y ago
Does anyone know why Intel FOGS did not get popular? https://web.archive.org/web/20070707090927/http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19005/?a=f https://web.archive.org/web/20070707090927/http://www.techno... Hardware signing input device inputs would advance the cat and mouse game by a lot. Then you'd need something physically moving the input device for you to aimbot. Or pay someone to properly crack open the secure enclave on your input device.
- bruce343434 5y ago
  Just make a "usb mouse" which is actually a programmable arduino? What makes an aimbot possible is that something can read the game's state and turn it into a mousemove signal. It can then feed it into the arduino instead of directly moving the mouse. The problem is preventing game state from being read. Part of this can be done by detecting DLL injections. Sadly you will always be able to write a monitor that runs as root. After all, the kernel literally administrates the computer's memory. Of course it has read, and write, access. So in the worst case, cheaters will use custom "memory drivers".
  - MacroChip 5y ago
    Any fake USB mouse that someone makes would not have the Intel Secure Enclave that signs mouse movements. So the mouse inputs would be rejected by the server/banned.
    - bruce343434 5y ago
      Why wouldn't it? How would the other mouse manufacturers get it?
      - MacroChip 5y ago
        Maybe a fake mouse could resolder a real secure enclave. I'm not sure what sort of remote attestation the enclave can perform. Mouse manufacturers would need to partner with Intel (or anyone else that makes a similar hardware signing system that a game developer trusts)
shaggie76 5y ago
In my experience as a game developer that has had to spend a fair amount of time dealing with cheaters I've seen that the most effective way to deal with them is to make a more interesting game. What I find depressing about this article is not the length people will go to cheat but that people are still interested in the same competitive FPS formula.
swiley 5y ago
Maybe we can finally agree kernel level anti cheat is useless and unjustified?
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  Or maybe we need physical anticheat devices wired into the motherboard.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    They’re called the TPM & ME/PSP.
- drran 5y ago
  Just record video of your screen, with your hands, and record movements of your mouse. It's enough to reproduce movements, measure reaction, and match them with game replay.
etempleton 5y ago
I was competitive (not professional, but I played with, against, and around pros) in FPS in the early days of competitive console shooters. Cheating was so rampant that people over a certain ranking were automatically considered cheaters. I would say the top 5 percent of ranked players were cheaters in some games and it was not subtle. You knew immediately who was cheating, but there usually wasn’t much you could do because there wasn’t usually any kind of reporting function or if it exsisted it was limited and not very effective.
skocznymroczny 5y ago
> Those display frames are then run through a computer vision-based object detection algorithm like You Only Look Once (YOLO) that has been trained to find human-shaped enemies in the image (or at least in a small central portion of the image near the targeting reticle). I wonder how well would these pre-trained networks work in a real-life automated turret.
Black101 5y ago
And they already can't control cheaters...
amirmaleki 5y ago
Isn't it horrifying to think that it can also be done in the real battlefield as well?
mmacvicarprett 5y ago
Valve has been using deep learning detection to analyze replays for years. Based on behaviors like reaction times and shooting precision they can flag suspicious cases. They are completely wrong thinking it is undetectable.
Linkd 5y ago
This is so interesting. I'm an avid CSGO player for decades, and watching the cat and mouse battle between cheat creators and Valve has been fascinating. In the last few years, Valve has been pushing for ML-centric approach of cheat detection (vs more intrusive client-side solutions that competitors like Valorant have). And the community feels negatively about that because it hasn't been so effective in the short term. But now after reading this, I understand why. The only way to combat ML-cheats, is with ML detection..

179 points by tarunupaday 5y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22856228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22856228 Someone had predicted this.

There are cheats that read the RAM via DMA device, so there is no need to use video signal. They also modify mouse movements via RPI kit that injects between the mouse and PC.

hnick 5y ago
Depending on the game, cheats can be a packet sniffing proxy. It won't even be on the gaming device.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nzmsv 5y ago

One may wonder what exactly is the point in a human watching this auto-playing game system, and whether they'd be better off watching a movie... But another way to look at it is as a preview of the future. Just picture this: a world of machines battling it out for supremacy, and somewhere off to the side there is an almost forgotten human brain. It seems to serve no discernible purpose, and yet it is actually the reason all the machines exist. What they are actually fighting to optimize, unbeknownst to them, is the dopamine release into a primate brain. Bonus points if the brain itself is a simulation :)

smolder 5y ago
Cheats are about two things: money or prestige. People want to get back at the players who so rudely beat them normally, and get high competitive rankings that make them look better than other players in that games community. Or, they use the cheats to create high ranking game accounts to sell to players who want to look good, or they simply cheat to win prize money. It should go without saying that this kind of activity destroys the interest in games affected by it. People don't like playing against superhuman enemies and having their progress impeded by it. It doesn't make sense that it would be enjoyable to play except that you can enjoy making money or making other people feel bad.
- nzmsv 5y ago
  That's exactly what I meant by my "preview of the future" comment. Imagine the same scenario, but in a higher-stakes environment than playing a game. Let's imagine there is a "leetcode aug" that lets one instantly pattern-match a problem and pumps a perfect solution into one's brain. That doesn't have to be very sophisticated AI. But once this kind of augmentation is available, the pressure is on for everyone to get it, or for the tech to be banned, or for the evaluation criteria to change.
- RHSeeger 5y ago
  > money or prestige Or accomplishment. Some people cheat just to accomplish something.
  - fdhfdjkfhdkj 5y ago
    Or just to watch the world burn...
  - frobozz 5y ago
    Not really, because if they cheated, they didn't actually accomplish it. They cheat to gain the prestige of having accomplished it.
    - watwut 5y ago
      No. They still feel accomplished. It is self deception, but many people are good at double thing. The sense of accomplishment comes from beating someone for many people. Cheats dont change that.
    - RHSeeger 5y ago
      This is incorrect. It is entirely possible to cheat and feel a sense of accomplishment. - You can cheat to finish a game and still enjoy the fact that you finished the parts that you didn't need to cheat by. - You can figure out how to cheat the game (ie, hex editing) yourself, and get a sense of accomplishment from that. It is entirely possible to both cheat at a game and have a sense of accomplishment related to that game. Just because it isn't something _you_ would do, doesn't mean it isn't true for others. Personally, I spent days mapping out the save file for Bard's Tale back in the day and manipulating it to my heart's content. It was fun, and I enjoyed it.
rantwasp 5y ago
yeah no. A machine does not have motivation. It does not have urges and desires. It may solve a problem perfectly buy it’s gonna be a while until they can grok why solving problems is worthwhile to begin with.
- nzmsv 5y ago
  That's the point: the AI in my imaginary world doesn't need desires. The human brain is acting as a "desire coprocessor".
  - rolleiflex 5y ago
    This is such an underrated idea. It is possible that at the logical conclusion of the current trend of machines getting better at previously human-only things, it might turn out that all we can really do that a machine cannot, is to want things. I don’t know if that is better than the alternative ending, but it’s something to think about.
    - pmontra 5y ago
      It started a long ago. I want to go to the sea and my car brings me there faster than I could if I walked. Actually, I'd never been at the sea if there were no machines (trains first). But the train, the car, the AI are only tools. Not much different than a knife or its first ancestors, the flint shards.
      - imtringued 5y ago
        Interesting, machines (and technically all human creation) not only fulfill desires, they also create them.
mwcremer 5y ago
Asimov had a thought about machines battling for supremacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
0-_-0 5y ago
Actually, it might be a good idea to instead of banning cheaters just put them on the same server to play each other without telling them.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Create a super human rank that is so extremely difficult to achieve that only bots can compete there. The next problem is that cheaters may decide to cheat 100% in one match and 0% in the other until they hit human ranks again. You'd have to write the scoring algorithm in a way that weights performance within individual games higher than average performance over multiple games. If cheaters insist on fighting human players they must lower the performance of their cheats to a human level. This allows people to cheat up to any rank they want but from the perspective of other players the game is still fair.
ithkuil 5y ago
Said primates have a dopamine down if they realize their life has no meaning, so the AI must provide them some meaning (illusion) so that they get back to the desired dopamine levels EDIT: for example by pretending they are just crappy machines and they need a human to be really good at doing things EDIT2: oh too much snow, I can't drive, please human help me out!

pmorici 5y ago

I was thinking about this the other day when I saw a YouTube Warzone stream lament that the game didn't have an anti-cheat system on the end users machine. I do wonder about the claim that it is undetectable though since a machine will be flawless where as even the best human players make mistakes.

detaro 5y ago
a good cheat will make mistakes if thats needed to look like a good human.
philliphaydon 5y ago
I stopped playing war zone due to the amount of cheaters. Most of the streamers cheat too and it’s sad. It can be a lot of fun to play but it’s like counter strike back in the day when it got over run by cheaters until valve started auto detecting them. There’s videos of a popular streamer called symphony or something where he’s shooting people through walls or sniping people when zoomed in that aren’t even visible. Then jokes “oh someone will call me a cheater”
denimnerd42 5y ago
I think it's currently impossible to detect. I think it would be possible to detect if you used some kind of player profile where you characterized how a player moved and then were able to determine through a replay whether the profiles matched. However then you could program the cheat AI to mimic the real player etc, etc. But this would take several evolutions where each tech would be ahead of the other.
- kilburn 5y ago
  I think you are spot on: statistical player profiling + controlled environment testing is the good and potentially permanent solution to this problem. In my vision every game creates a model of your behavior/capabilities (server-side). For example, in a fps game it could consider your reaction times, overshoot distance on quick movements, look-around frequency, movement patterns, etc.. When you reach certain level you must certify yourself. That is, you must go to an actual physical location and play in a controlled environment. If your behavior there matches your model you get certified for that level of play and can keep going. If you don't... you get banned. Of course the model would track your progress and ask/force you to re-certify as you keep improving/reach the limits of your current certification. Would this eliminate all cheats? Probably not. However, since you can't play outside of the standard deviation of your controlled-environment capabilities, I would argue that it doesn't matter anymore. To a honest player a cheater would look like "a player having a good day" (which is something that happens and you need to deal with anyway) instead of looking like "a player with superhuman capabilities". The problem with this approach is how to build such controlled-environment certification centers and procedures. This is a big task, but also a big opportunity. It is not that much different from examination centers that already exist in the learning/certification industry. Furthermore, since gaming is such a huge market (and growing) and certification centers don't need to be tied to specific games (they can be a service that games hire and people pay for) the whole ordeal seems doable. So doable in fact that I could see myself investing in a startup having this goal.

okwubodu 5y ago

This is close to my ideal way of avoiding a runaway Ultron/Skynet-type AI scenario: airgap it and force the use of a physical mouse, monitor, and keyboard to interact with the outside world. At least once it reaches Twitter we can stop it before it destroys humanity one robotic keystroke at a time.

coolspot 5y ago
Connection to the world only through mouse/keyboard won’t stop AGI that is smarter and more productive than any hacker team in the world. It will type it’s own source code (but better) into a hacked TPU/GPU/whatever cluster using a keyboard and vim, no problem.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  Yeah, but we don't really need to worry until it starts using Emacs.
jtsiskin 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box

denimnerd42 5y ago

I did something like this with Dota2 where I'd have it monitor the opposing team to save their locations when they appeared on the minimap in a shaded color on a 2nd monitor on that 2nd computer. I used an HDMI splitter and HDMI capture card to send the input to the second computer. I did the CV stuff with opencv library. Taking it a step further as shown in the article could be done to do stuff like auto creep killing vs human and stuff like that.

ed25519FUUU 5y ago
The meta game of “cheating” sounds way more fun to me than playing any of these games.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  Dota 2 is probably the most complex game I've ever personally played. It takes hundreds of hours of play just to learn the basics of the rules. There are over a hundred distinct hero characters to play, each with mostly unique skills. At a few hours per hero just to learn the essentials, it can be upwards of 500 hours before you even have a good idea of what's going on. Getting a feel for the overall flow of the game, where to be and where not to be, etc... can take thousands of hours. There is no sport and few other pre-computer competitive games that even approach this level of depth and complexity. But speaking of playing the meta-game more than the game, I had a ton of fun making a "hero picker". At the beginning of each match there's a mini-game where each of the ten players gets to choose their hero out of the available pool of 119. Some heroes combo well others on their own team, and others counter the enemy choices well. This leads to an explosion of possibilities, with something like 4e20 possible distinct combinations, so choosing well is... difficult. I downloaded the outcome of 30 million games (just a few days' worth!) and tried a bunch of ML/AI algorithms to come up with an optimal hero picker: Given 'n' current picks, choose the best hero for the nest pick. That produced high win rates but boring games: it just picked the overall strongest characters with very little variance. I then tried to make it pick the hero with the highest differential win rate. That is, it would sometimes recommend a hero that would decrease your chance of winning, but increase your chance for that hero relative to other games. This would give the opportunity to play weak heroes in games that suited them best. That was okay, but still not optimal, because it used the win rates from very bad players. I then took my 30M games, and produced an automatic chess-style ranking for all players. I threw away all "weird" games and players only seen a few times, giving me a clean learning set of regular players with a known skill set. I then filtered it to my personal ID number +/- a 10% skill range (still millions of games!) and trained the ML on that, hoping to give optimal recommendations for my own skill set. That was a good try, but it turned out that people in my skill range are terrible at the meta-game of picking heroes. I then threw up my hands and simply had the ML train on the top 10% of players. That was amazing! It was like having the knowledge of the best players distilled into an AI. It recommended some amazing combos, and generally stopped recommending heroes that are strong in the mid-tier "pub" games but weak against skilled opponents. My skill went up, and I slowly climbed the ranks to about the top 20% or so. Fun times, fun times...

modeless 5y ago

Even game streaming services like Stadia won't be immune to cheating with this kind of setup.

dexterhaslem 5y ago
well, ignoring the fact no one is doing competitive gaming on something with that horrible latency

narrator 5y ago

The irony is that real war with actual guns that kill people will likely have aimbots on small arms in the next decade.

l33t2328 5y ago
I’m afraid you’ve been watching too many movies. This tech isn’t close to deployment for an infantryman.
- bserge 5y ago
  Should be, but what's the point of giving it to a human when it could be better used by a robot. I was amazed by this back then, there's probably better stuff by now: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/17000-linux-powered-rifle-brings-auto-aim-to-the-real-world/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/17000-linux-powered-...
- s5300 5y ago
  Who needs infantrymen when you have suicide drone swarms, bunker busters, MIRV's, thermobaric weapons (vacuum bombs), instant retina frying laser disco drones... Infantry are going to be a thing of the past for anything more than proxy wars. Maybe frogmen will have their day or something. The future of human violence at scale is fucking terrifying. Edit: Oh, and how could I forget. Our lovely fucking sword deploying hellfire missiles https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/the-story-of-americas-hellfire-missile-full-of-swords/ https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/the-story-of-americas-hellfire-... This is where you insert the joke about studying the blade I think.
  - mattowen_uk 5y ago
    > Infantry are going to be a thing of the past for anything more than proxy wars. I disagree. The reason we still have millions of factory workers doing jobs a robot can do, is that the human is easily trained, and easily replaced, and very cheap to run. If the human breaks, you just replace it from the endless supply of other humans. Infantry[1] is the same. Take a gun, learn how to shoot it, run at the enemy. If the solider dies, just replace it with another one from the endless supply of humans. Robots on the other hand are very expensive to replace. Until we can auto-build Terminators[2] for less than the 'cost' of a human, robots will never replace people in low skill, high churn roles. --- [1] I'm not talking about proper specialist soldiers here, just the barely-trained cannon fodder. [2] ..and we all know how that turns out.

ALittleLight 5y ago

I wonder if the anti-cheat system could insert ghost enemies for a few frames, or about 20-30ms, fast enough that humans wouldn't really notice. If players are shooting too often at ghosts, that may be a good reason to ban.

somebodythere 5y ago
They could just modify the cheat to filter out enemies that appear for less than two frames .
- stickfigure 5y ago
  True, but there would be a lag of days to weeks before the cheaters adapted. You could bust everyone in the mean time.
  - allendoerfer 5y ago
    Valve is actually doing that. Sometimes when they update VAC, they intentionally do not ban anyone for a while to catch as many as possible. Not unlike the police is handling drug dealers.
sudosysgen 5y ago
Sadly that would be game breaking, seeing an enemy for a frame can totally break your game-sense.
rangewookie 5y ago
20-30ms would be noticeable to a trained eye. Speedrunners often hit buttons frame perfect during a 1/30th or 1/60th second window. Many people today are playing on 120-240hz monitors. Additionally, if you're training on gameplay from X game and that game has theoretical ghost frames that the player doesn't see / shoot at, then the hack shouldn't shoot at it either. It's a bit of a chicken an egg problem.
- lifeformed 5y ago

ajxs 5y ago

I played competitive level Quake 3/Quake Live for a number of years, during the height of its popularity. I also have friends who play more modern competitive FPS games, such as CS:GO. Even though QL was only a small online scene, the use aimbots, triggerbots, wallhacks, and similar tools was always very common at the competitive level. Quake Live had very limited anti-cheat functionality, so it was never relied upon for proving legitimacy. Despite this, cheaters generally didn't last long in competitive play before being banned. Even if the computer can't unequivocally identify the presence of these tools, skilled players could usually tell the difference. Even if skilled players couldn't tell by watching alone, other contextual factors usually gave hackers away. Such as lack of LAN experience, no history of natural skill progression, etc. I'm aware that this doesn't prove that we caught every hacker, just that we caught many of them. These cheat tools could apparently be tuned to give extremely subtle advantages to players. Still, over a long enough time period the tool would eventually do something inexplicable enough by normal beahviour to give the player away. I haven't exactly kept up with competitive FPS in years now, however it doesn't seem hard to make aimbots that work well, it seems very difficult though to make ones that consistently appear natural to a trained eye.

artificialLimbs 5y ago
Can confirm. I was playing Quake Live extremely well one day (for whatever reason??) and a couple of the guys specced me and announced that I, indeed, was not cheating. That led me to wonder how they knew and some searching turned up a few threads about various tools and tricks of the trade WRT that game specifically.
_the_inflator 5y ago
I side with you. Also being a pro-gamer in RTS years ago, I can relate. There are many small steps between n00b level and mastery and a lot has to come together to be at expert level in gaming. Usually experts can play in variable settings, cheaters only in one particular. Experts can adapt, while cheaters usually not. Usually real talk about how you handled and interpreted a certain situation will show the difference. Cheaters usually are not the most talkative. However sometimes there is a make or break in a certain game. While cheaters are usually spotted in the long run, it spoils almost every time the fun in the short run. Missed opportunities to tourney advancement, frustration etc. can make or break players. Are we talking about the true winner, Carl Lewis, in the 100m finals in Seoul in 1988 or Ben Johnson? I saw some guys with really good potential leaving out of frustration and that is really sad.

jay_kyburz 5y ago

"The only winning move it not to play." Game developers should stop trying to police this and let the bots fight each other. The game becomes, who can tune their bots better. Train the bots for team work or more strategic level play. In the meantime, the rest of us can just enjoy some co-op gaming against some easy bots, or play competitive matches against just friends and family. If some random person on your server is no fun to play again, just kick them. If you are really into the competitive gaming and want to take the games more seriously, I'd like to see players go meet other players face to face. Join a local league and play on hardware you don't own with other people watching. I used to love playing Quake down at the local internet cafe with a bunch of friends. We had a small 4v4 league going.

jamesgreenleaf 5y ago

The cheater's version of the halting problem.

userbinator 5y ago
I would say it's closer to a Turing test.

ehnto 5y ago

Cheating in the game "Warzone" has been a really interesting thing to watch unfold. It makes the game really frustrating to play and I have stopped playing it, but outside of that it's interesting to watch players, even high-visibility streamers, attempt to play without getting caught and succeeding at that. In Warzone the map is huge, and 150 players are split up in to competing squads of 1-4 players. So it becomes very much an information heavy game. Knowing where people are, even when they're hundreds of meters away, is extremely valuable, and that's one of the hacks people have. They see nametags, hitboxes and information for players overlaid on their screen. They also change colour based on if they're in line-of-sight, so you can say "I see that squad, but they can't shoot at me, so I am safe" and that's extremely valuable. Second to that, they can use aim-assist but the highest-end aimbots are really quite nuanced, and they allow you to smooth out the assisted movements and only auto-aim in specific scenarios, and that makes it really hard to tell they're using an aimbot. It just looks like a really good player. Gone are the "snap to head" aimbots of Counter Strike that were so obvious. You can report someone all-day-long and they may never get banned because the hack software is competent, and it's hard to demark the difference between "Knowledge you shouldn't be able to have" and "Intuition of a good player".

voidnullnil 5y ago
Aimbots were already using "smoothing" methods in the original CS. Snapping to headshot is more to piss people off.

userbinator 5y ago

This is basically the classic "analog hole." I remember over a decade ago doing something far less sophisticated to "cheat" in a turn-based projectile physics game --- I used a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomogram printed on transparency and just put it on the monitor to quickly calculate parameters between turns.

jon-wood 5y ago
At a LAN party a few years ago one of the games being played was Modern Warfare 2, a game where your gun is almost always going to hit in exactly the centre of the screen, but that’s made more difficult by requiring you to look down the sights to get an aim point, which slows you down. One of the people near me worked around that by taking a few shots down the sights and then sticking a blob of blue tack on his monitor where the shots hit, creating an instant targeting reticle available at all times.
- teddyh 5y ago
  That’s an old trick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLHBGigq4zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLHBGigq4zk

aurelian15 5y ago

This is just one example of the "analogue hole" [1] problem shared by all anti-cheat/DRM systems. At least in theory, there is no technology that can prevent exploits like this short of dystopian levels of surveillance and locking down computing devices even further. By that I mean encrypted communication on all computer buses (including USB, HDMI), and only allowing access to those busses via physically hardened "secure" enclaves, up to (in the end game) big-brother-like surveillance (think electronic proctoring solutions). I think that this is exactly the problem with such DRM schemes---the ensuing cat-and-mouse game will inevitably lead to trampling the user's freedoms, because locking down computing devices and environments to ridiculous levels is the only way in which DRM can be made to work. Of course, for now, cheats like the one featured in the article should be fairly easy to detect (at least from what I've seen in the linked video). The motion of the bot is extremely jerky; a simple rule-based system, or, if you want to be fancy, a neural network based anomaly detection system should be able to detect this. On the side of the cheat authors, this could be easily circumvented if they include a "calibration phase", where user input trains a simple neural network to stochastically emulate the dynamics of the user's sensor-action loop. The cheat could then act slightly faster than the user, giving them an edge while still using their unique dynamics profile. I wonder where this will lead eventually, and I genuinely feel sorry for all the people who pour their heart and soul into competitive gaming; I don't think that this kind of cheating is something that can and should (see above) be prevented in the long-run. The best possible outcome I can imagine is that online gaming becomes more cooperative or once more converges back to small groups of people who know and trust each other. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole Edit: Spelling, grammar, and clarity

rightbyte 5y ago
LAN tournaments solve the problem, though. So it is not that bad.
floatboth 5y ago
> neural network based anomaly detection system Valve has already been doing that for a few years: https://www.pcgamer.com/vacnet-csgo/ https://www.pcgamer.com/vacnet-csgo/
5y ago

trhway 5y ago

sounds like a preview of a very close future of drone wars. The humans would just have no chances to participate effectively in such a fight.

riveducha 5y ago

I did this for the FPS game Valorant, not for cheating, but to see if I could make a 100% computer-controlled opponent.[1] It involved some weird Logitech mouse hacking for the control side of things and was overall really rough, especially with how much latency was involved. With a normal USB capture device, the latency is around 50-100ms, so it’s hard to do lightning-fast reaction. Even more so if your view is moving at the same time. Everything that normal aimbots do by directly accessing the game’s memory suddenly becomes much harder when you don’t have memory access. For anyone interested though, the computer vision models publicly available are both very good and also easy to fine-tune for a specific use case (e.g. a specific game). [1] https://riveducha.onfabrica.com/valorant-ai-pytorch-opencv-logitech https://riveducha.onfabrica.com/valorant-ai-pytorch-opencv-l...

the8472 5y ago

Funny, recently there were threads about anti-cheat rootkits where people argued they're justified because they provide some defense against cheaters who wouldn't be sophisticated enough to exploit the analog hole. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27640553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27640553

0xfaded 5y ago

Oh man, this brings back memories using SCAR as a kid to automate RuneScape. That was my gateway drug into computer vision.

mavhc 5y ago

If a game can be easily played by a computer maybe it's time to start playing a more complicated game, worthy of your human brain

Timshel 5y ago
Tell that to all the chess players ...
- beardyw 5y ago
  Interesting that Alpha Zero, by playing itself, has come up with some new approaches which are feeding back into the professional game.
blindmute 5y ago
Name one game that a human is better at than a trained NN. Starcraft 2, chess, go, Dota 2, have all been shown that AI wins. If a game is digital, AI will win after sufficient modeling. I don't think any of that negates the merit of the games themselves for human play.
- b0rsuk 5y ago
  Any 4X game.
  - blindmute 5y ago
    4X games are not especially complex, so I find it hard to believe they are an exception. More likely no one has bothered to train a good NN on that kind of game.
- mavhc 5y ago
  Hacker News?

mondo3343 5y ago

This is the cheat tool the article refers to: https://www.userviz.com/index.html https://www.userviz.com/index.html

MacroChip 5y ago

Does anyone know why Intel FOGS did not get popular? https://web.archive.org/web/20070707090927/http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19005/?a=f https://web.archive.org/web/20070707090927/http://www.techno... Hardware signing input device inputs would advance the cat and mouse game by a lot. Then you'd need something physically moving the input device for you to aimbot. Or pay someone to properly crack open the secure enclave on your input device.

bruce343434 5y ago
Just make a "usb mouse" which is actually a programmable arduino? What makes an aimbot possible is that something can read the game's state and turn it into a mousemove signal. It can then feed it into the arduino instead of directly moving the mouse. The problem is preventing game state from being read. Part of this can be done by detecting DLL injections. Sadly you will always be able to write a monitor that runs as root. After all, the kernel literally administrates the computer's memory. Of course it has read, and write, access. So in the worst case, cheaters will use custom "memory drivers".
- MacroChip 5y ago
  Any fake USB mouse that someone makes would not have the Intel Secure Enclave that signs mouse movements. So the mouse inputs would be rejected by the server/banned.
  - bruce343434 5y ago
    Why wouldn't it? How would the other mouse manufacturers get it?
    - MacroChip 5y ago
      Maybe a fake mouse could resolder a real secure enclave. I'm not sure what sort of remote attestation the enclave can perform. Mouse manufacturers would need to partner with Intel (or anyone else that makes a similar hardware signing system that a game developer trusts)

shaggie76 5y ago

In my experience as a game developer that has had to spend a fair amount of time dealing with cheaters I've seen that the most effective way to deal with them is to make a more interesting game. What I find depressing about this article is not the length people will go to cheat but that people are still interested in the same competitive FPS formula.

swiley 5y ago

Maybe we can finally agree kernel level anti cheat is useless and unjustified?

wizzwizz4 5y ago
Or maybe we need physical anticheat devices wired into the motherboard.
- teddyh 5y ago
  They’re called the TPM & ME/PSP.
drran 5y ago
Just record video of your screen, with your hands, and record movements of your mouse. It's enough to reproduce movements, measure reaction, and match them with game replay.

etempleton 5y ago

I was competitive (not professional, but I played with, against, and around pros) in FPS in the early days of competitive console shooters. Cheating was so rampant that people over a certain ranking were automatically considered cheaters. I would say the top 5 percent of ranked players were cheaters in some games and it was not subtle. You knew immediately who was cheating, but there usually wasn’t much you could do because there wasn’t usually any kind of reporting function or if it exsisted it was limited and not very effective.

skocznymroczny 5y ago

> Those display frames are then run through a computer vision-based object detection algorithm like You Only Look Once (YOLO) that has been trained to find human-shaped enemies in the image (or at least in a small central portion of the image near the targeting reticle). I wonder how well would these pre-trained networks work in a real-life automated turret.

Black101 5y ago

And they already can't control cheaters...

amirmaleki 5y ago

Isn't it horrifying to think that it can also be done in the real battlefield as well?

mmacvicarprett 5y ago

Valve has been using deep learning detection to analyze replays for years. Based on behaviors like reaction times and shooting precision they can flag suspicious cases. They are completely wrong thinking it is undetectable.

Linkd 5y ago

This is so interesting. I'm an avid CSGO player for decades, and watching the cat and mouse battle between cheat creators and Valve has been fascinating. In the last few years, Valve has been pushing for ML-centric approach of cheat detection (vs more intrusive client-side solutions that competitors like Valorant have). And the community feels negatively about that because it hasn't been so effective in the short term. But now after reading this, I understand why. The only way to combat ML-cheats, is with ML detection..