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ICYMI Riot makes players install a kernel-level driver to play games, so we might be witnessing the start of a once-in-a-decade cybersecurity Chernobyl. https:
by meltyness 4y ago
ICYMI Riot makes players install a kernel-level driver to play games, so we might be witnessing the start of a once-in-a-decade cybersecurity Chernobyl.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855600
- Y_Y 4y agoIf the lasting tragedy of Chernobyl was the curtailment of nuclear power in favour of burning hydrocarbons, then will the victim of Cheriotnobyo be thsy society turns against MOBAs?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y agoThis is why I begrudgingly had to build a separate PC for nothing but gaming. Furious that it is the only way to firewall the cowboy coding what-is-security development practices of the industry.
- viraptor 4y agoWhy a separate PC rather than a separate boot drive?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y agoIf the drives live in the same host system, they should be mountable by the other OS. The untrusted gaming partition/drive could then manipulate the trusted one. In practice, that would require the malware to be specifically targeted to dual-booters (representing a tiny fraction of users). Much better to go after the millions of Windows gaming PCs that also host the entirely of someone’s digital life. Which is to say the physical separation likely buys me little real security, but it does make me feel better.
- scotty79 4y agoMaybe you could keep the secure partition encrypted?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y agoThe untrusted partition could ransomware encrypt my already encrypted drive. Again, talking low likelihood that dual booters are a worthwhile target. Much more available low hanging fruit.
- weberer 4y agoYou should be encrypting your secure drive so stuff like this doesn't happen. Also so burglars can't grab your physical disk, put it in their machine, and read all your files. When installing most distros, they give you a checkbox to enable LUKS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Unified_Key_Setup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Unified_Key_Setup
- viraptor 4y agoBitlocker is also the default on most w10 and all w11.
- Narishma 4y agoIIRC it was not available on Windows 10 Home, which I'd guess to be the largest install base. I don't know about Windows 11.
- viraptor 4y agoWin 10 and 11 Home still allows device encryption (https://www.windowscentral.com/how-enable-device-encryption-windows-10-home https://www.windowscentral.com/how-enable-device-encryption-...)
- Narishma 4y agoThat requires TPM v2 and UEFI. I guess that's why I've never seen it in any of the Windows machines I have access to.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y agoThe untrusted OS could ransomware encrypt the already-encrypted trusted one. The attacker is denied access to my SSH keys, but so am I. Fully willing to confess this feels an outsized threat model, but it is something. Going forward, this separation will allow me to undersize my next linux workstation which requires far more modest hardware if never running games.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jpeter 4y agoAnticheat has to be kernel-level or it's useless
- otuva 4y agoAt this point, it's up to the user to make that trade-off, but most of the players don't have enough information to make that decision. Sure, I wouldn't want any cheaters on my games, but these systems are not fool-proof and cannot circumvent every single cheater out there. Dedicated enough cheaters are getting what they want anyway, while the unknowing user is left with a backdoor on their systems (in the event of a compromise)
- Operyl 4y agoThe goal isn’t to stop every cheater, the goal is to reduce the number of cheaters. They achieve this by making the monetary cost of cheating so high that it doesn’t happen often enough to affect the vast majority of players. “Private cheats” are expensive, “public cheats” get killed off quickly, pushing up the cost of “private cheats”.
- nightfly 4y agoIt's already useless (for motivated attackers), since you can capture video output and send input from a separate device
- tester756 4y agoComplexity increases shitton of times If you reduce amount of cheaters from 1000 to 10, then it's still huge win for the player base and average player's experience
- mrguyorama 4y agoNone of this was as big a problem twenty years ago, despite cheats being easier to make. We had community run servers with occasional admin presence. All you need is an IP and username based banlist. I don't care if occasionally an admin is a power hungry 12 year old, I can just go next door.
- 0x457 4y agoIt's either that or cheaters everywhere.
- haunter 4y agoStartup idea: make a non-intrusive functioning anticheat system
- cowthulhu 4y agoI’d be interested to know if that’s possible, purely on a technical level.
- meltyness 4y agoDetecting superphysiological maneuvers is probably a trivial way to do this, for certain gameplay scenarios. There's established limits on reaction time, for example, it's just a matter of differentiating between reaction and preemption which converge at the highest echelons.
- ramranch 4y agoSince it's trivial, I look forward to your proof-of-concept in the near future
- viraptor 4y agoThere are limits on the reaction time, but you can own all humans by consistently hitting close to that limit and achieving useful things when you do. Adding a bit of delay to all bots would not make them useless.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoCheating is a lot more sophisticated than the simple aimbots you're thinking of. A lot of cheats focus on giving the player extra information. In the context of big money online tournaments this motivates some pretty extreme behavior, like folks running a PCI card set up to access memory directly and find the game state for player positions, then indicate that to the player somehow. This defeats even kernel level anti-cheat.
- ehhthing 4y agoLeague of Legends does not use a Kernel-level anti-cheat. If you had actually read the article in question, this would have been made clear.
- mattwilsonn888 4y ago> ...entire game code for League of Legends and its tools, as well as Packman, your usermode anti-cheat. We understand the significance of these artifacts and the impact their release to the public would have on your major titles, Valorant and League of Legends Mate you are chastising him for not reading the article and you are contradicted by the first paragraph.
- Operyl 4y agoAnd in your own quote they stated it’s the user mode anticheat, and in Riot’s statement they said it’s an old/legacy anti cheat. This is not Vanguard, the kernel level anti cheat.
- worthless-trash 4y agoJust to further clarify, Code running in the kernel context is different than code running in the user context. Another process can modify user context, whereas it is expected that code running in the kernel context is "much harder". A dedicated attacker could write kernel code which does the modifications, however this raises the bar and the anti cheat software could the game from running if it detects any unsigned drivers. All this does is raise the bar to where the game is run into virtualization where the host OS can inspect the guests memory and infer details that way. The cat and mouse game goes on forever, the trick is to make it just hard enough so that the average person who wants to cheat will not not have the time, patience or financial incentive to do so.
- adql 4y ago[flagged]
- 4y ago
- ThinkBeat 4y agoThis makes me happy I am not into playing computer games.
- mrguyorama 4y agoThere are A LOT of games that aren't League Of Legends or Valorant. The vast vast vast majority don't need kernel access.