26 ms·

Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

• supportengineer 2y ago
  Not a gamer - Is Steam basically a package manager like 'yum' or 'brew', but for games?
  • dark-star 2y ago
    more like an app store
  • Jnr 2y ago
    Yes, and also a store and a community platform.
  • PeakKS 2y ago
    More like flatpak/flathub since it has it's own runtime, with the addition of community features and purchasing.
  • ranger207 2y ago
    Similar to Google Play with Google Play Services: both an app store and a set of services for games to use
  • ukd1 2y ago
    Yes; but more like the apple App Store - they take a cut, and (to some/varying extent) try to ensure some level of legitimacy / quality.
  • sunshowers 2y ago
    Like 10% of Steam is yum/brew. The other 90% is: * GUI * managing installations, including things like Proton to run Win32 games on Linux, and Fossilize to precompile shaders * bandwidth-saving stuff like being able to transfer games locally * being able to play remotely in a variety of configurations: LAN, WAN, or having a friend connect to your local session ("Remote Play Together") * pretty good support for mapping any controller you have to any controller inputs a game wants * cloud saves * a bunch of community features like forums and broadcasting * family sharing * a VR runtime * marketing for devs (regular sales, algorithmic recommendations etc) * an API for devs with various services * the backend infrastructure for all of the above It's been around for a long time so it's quite feature-rich at this point. Lots of things that generally make sense to have.
    • m463 2y ago
      and telemetry
  • red_admiral 2y ago
    More like an app store, which is really just a GUI/payments/licence layer on top of a package manager.
• throwaway48476 2y ago
  After the crowdstrike disaster 3rd party kernel drivers need to be shunned for non critical applications. Games publishers have been bad actors in this space for a long time now. The genshin impact anticheat was used in a malware campaign. Rockstar was very misleading trying to imply their kernel driver not being compatible with the steam deck was valves fault.
  • doublerabbit 2y ago
    What decides critical or non-critical. One could argue that a game isn't critical but one could say it's critical to stop hackers. If you were to take the stance that gaming isn't critical than with that logic you're then claiming multiplayer hacking is a feature of the game. Doesn't do well for the community or the company. But nor do the rootkits do good for the consumer.
    • throwaway48476 2y ago
      Critical as in "my gpu is a paperweight without a driver".
      • sgjohnson 2y ago
        GPU driver can technically be userland too. Look at what Apple has done in recent years. kexts (kernel-level drivers) are basically all but unsupported today, and both DriverKit and IOKit are fully userland.
        • throwaway48476 2y ago
          Performance critical drivers are always going to be kernel mode.
    • avery17 2y ago
      It hasn't stopped hackers though.
      • 2y ago
• lousken 2y ago
  Good, the sooner devs realize they need to do server side properly, the better
  • forgetfreeman 2y ago
    Aaany day now...
  • teen 2y ago
    I think most of these companies do do the server side properly. There are plenty of hacks that just make a client play ungodly well. Like macros, aimbots, cooldown tracking, auto-hex
    • plopz 2y ago
      I'm not sure about that first part, some of the biggest games like gtav is an embarrassment in the concept of never trust the client.
      • Matheus28 2y ago
        GTA V is an exception because it's so easy to cheat in. I believe it's peer-to-peer with no verification among peers that what happened should actually have happened. It's basically impossible to secure that.
        • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
          I suppose that was an intentional choice, I can imagine running the amount of worlds that GTA has (iirc you only have up to 32 or so players in a world? Something like that) doesn't scale well cost-wise. IDK if AWS and co were up for the task yet back when. But since you earn in-game currency, not having a central authority check these things is... an interesting choice. I suspect GTA VI may improve on these things and have centralised/dedicated/anti-cheat-guaranteed servers. Then again, it never impacted their profit margins so idk.
  • arp242 2y ago
• 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  I built a dedicated gaming PC a couple of years ago. Too much cowboy coding in the industry for me to feel safe running this code on my main computer. Even games for which I pay have supposedly* been scanning/uploading personal data presumably for some adtech purposes. Why should I ever trust a gaming company to take security seriously? There was a story a few years ago about how one guy at home debugged GTA5’s atrocious loading times without any resources. Loading times which were notoriously bad and surely had a negative impact on revenue, yet nobody in the company could be bothered. *Never verified it, but I recall the new owners of Kernel Space Program were accused of reporting personal data files to the cloud.
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    Oh yeah, that was down to a huge JSON file / slow JSON parser or something wasn't it? That was so bad.
    • tpxl 2y ago
      They wrote their own json parser which used strlen() all over the place, which is O(n), resulting in O(n^2) complexity for json parsing. The guy shimmed the function to return a cached response if it was called with the same string consecutively, which it was for parsing the JSON. The JSON contained the items in the real-money store btw.
      • consteval 2y ago
        Why would anyone ever write their own JSON parser? There're countless libs available that are hyper-optimized.
• mattigames 2y ago
  I still hope someday the European Union forces Steam to allow transferring of games "owned", even if it's time-restricted (e.g. can't transfer the same game twice in a month)
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    Oh yeah, they did rule that you were legally allowed to transfer / resell digital games... but not that Steam & co had to offer the option.
  • dark-star 2y ago
    ...but you don't buy the game anymore, you acquire a license for using (playing) it. If you want games that you can re-sell, you will have to keep buying them on physical media (or on appstores that don't have DRM like GOG)
    • mattigames 2y ago
      I know, that's why I added quotes around "owned", so in other words what I meant is that the EU should force Steam to create the option to transfer that license among its own users.
      • dark-star 2y ago
        Yeah but I can just assume that this would also apply to e.g. Microsoft Windows licenses, and that Microsoft lobbies strongly against such a law (also every other vendor who locks software licenses to a particular end-user or licensee) Note that I wouldn't very much welcome such a law but I wouldn't bet on it happening any time soon
        • tpxl 2y ago
          You can, and people do, resell Windows licenses in Europe. Microsoft seethes about it, but can go fuck itself, because this is legal.
• AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
  Do kernel-level anti-cheat measures even work if I'm running Steam as a Flatpak + Using the game under Proton? I (naively, perhaps) assumed the security sandboxing model of flatpak would restrict that level of access.
  • LelouBil 2y ago
    Does any Linux kernel level anti cheat exists ? If you're running under proton, it can't work. Proton/wine are not virtualizing a windows kernel, they are intercepting syscalls/library calls and running the equivalent linux code.
  • tdb7893 2y ago
    Some anti-cheat has clients for Linux (the ones that don't generally just disallow playing on Proton). I don't think the Linux ones are kernel level but don't quote me on that.
• butterfly42069 2y ago
  The biggest giveaway the kernel level anti cheat is stupid is that Easy Anti-Cheat works on Linux without kernel level access.
  • jsheard 2y ago
    It only works on Linux if the developer allows it, because it's not nearly as effective on Linux. Rust (the game not the language) uses EAC but doesn't run on Linux by choice for example. Neither does Fortnite. Apex Legends uses EAC and does run on Linux, and now nearly every public cheat for that game targets the Linux version because it's such a soft target. I don't really like the status quo of installing random kernel-mode crap either, but nobody has a compelling answer for how to not make cheating absolutely trivial without it. Usermode anticheat barely does anything, serverside anticheat can only do so much, and the only other alternative is switching to console platforms which prevent cheating by giving the user zero freedom.
    • ChocolateGod 2y ago
      > game targets the Linux version because it's such a soft target. I was going to say games on Linux should require secure boot so cheat kernels and modules can't run, but then the kernel could just lie about it being enabled.
      • jsheard 2y ago
        Most Linux cheats don't even bother with kernel modules, a process running as root can read and write arbitrary memory in the game process without an unprivileged usermode anticheat having any way to know it's happening. It's embarrassingly easy compared to the hoops you have to jump through to maybe avoid detection on Windows.
      • sunshowers 2y ago
        Right, provenance is an issue. I suspect the only way that might balance everyone's interests would be to set up a separate OS installation for competitive games. This could be done via bare-metal dual boot, via a hypervisor, or just by having a completely different computer for playing games on (what I have). At least in that world you still have a lot more freedom than you do on console, such as the ability to mod games that don't need anti-cheat (which is almost all of them).
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• jolmg 2y ago
  I've never seen a game request root privileges, and I would think installation of anything kernel-level would need that. None of the steam binaries have setuid nor capabilities set. Have anyone seen games that request root privileges? EDIT: I'm gathering from this[1] and the fact that no wine-related package have kernel modules included and no executable from any of those packages have setuid nor capabilities set, that this isn't really a problem in Linux, just in Windows. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/gjzkzk/will_wine_ever_be_able_to_support_kernel/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/gjzkzk/will_w...
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • sadeshmukh 2y ago
    Everything says "wants to make changes to your device". I accidentally installed EAC that way.
    • keyringlight 2y ago
      It's worth noting that when you first install it, steam asks to install a service to assist with its duties, presumably for most install tasks. Steam has been around long enough and that service is now trouble free that it became part of the furniture most ignore as part of the background. That's aside from how users may be trained to hit 'yes' on any permission box that comes up to swat it away and play the game.
      • jsheard 2y ago
        > It's worth noting that when you first install it, steam asks to install a service to assist with its duties, presumably for most install tasks. They do this because Steam was originally designed in the XP era when you could write whatever you want to Program Files without escalating to admin, and instead of refactoring where they put their files when Vista made the permissions more strict they started installing that backdoor service which lets them keep putting everything in Program Files without triggering UAC prompts all the time. It's a pretty gross and unnecessary hack, but I doubt they're ever going to fix it at this point.
• Topfi 2y ago
  Does anyone know whether disclosure of Denuvo and similarly controversial "add-ons" does negatively affect sales? Maybe I am cynical, but I have come to the conclusion that whether it is always online DRM, rootkit-level anti-cheat or the need to have an account for offline play, community anger is often only maintained when a game had other things going against it from the get-go. Not against disclosing this of course, that is a great move for those who actually are willing to walk-the-walk, just asking whether we should perhaps temper our expectations on the impact of such a measure.
  • dmonitor 2y ago
    The most recent study I saw showed that Denuvo significantly helps revenue capture within the first few months of a game's release https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1875952124002532 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759...
    • grayhatter 2y ago
      I can't figure out what that article is trying to prove. "When DRM remains uncracked, we can't detect any losses due to piracy." well duh. Does it otherwise effect sales? Do any small games use it, or just large studios?
    • bitwize 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • lomase 2y ago
        As Gabe Newell said "piracy is a service problem" I could pirate every game I have on my Steam account. I don't do it because the added value that Steam gives me.
        • m463 2y ago
          A better example would be GOG.
• bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Good. I absolutely refuse to compromise my system by using these things. Games should be required to let people know what they are signing up for. And if that means more companies choose to avoid kernel anti-cheat, so much the better. I'm still mad that I can't play Helldivers 2 - a freaking co-op game where cheaters can't pose a problem - because of this nonsense.
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    > a freaking co-op game where cheaters can't pose a problem Winning doesn't give you any permanent rewards?
    • bigstrat2003 2y ago
      Why would that matter? If someone gets rewards that they didn't earn, it doesn't negatively impact anyone else.
• DEATHROW 2y ago
  [flagged]
• pjmlp 2y ago
  This is very much welcomed.
• andrewmcwatters 2y ago
  I think the population of game developers and their knowledge of multiplayer networking is fundamentally getting worse over time, because I see things that should not be architecturally possible in a lot of newer multiplayer games. This whole thing anti-cheat thing is just a separate problem entirely, but it's so painfully exacerbated by the first.
  • juunpp 2y ago
    The anti-cheat also goes hand in hand with the predatory business models of "always online" and micro transactions. Those things sell because of advantage over other players or just social factors in the case of cosmetics. Wouldn't be as relevant in an offline game. But now, since the game is online (for business, not technical, reasons), we need some way to keep everyone honest. I'm just hoping this entire business model dies, along with the anti-cheat and everything else with it.
  • janderland 2y ago
    Strange take. These things are being put forward by major companies who hire very good engineers. Riot Games makes the most popular game in the entire world (League of Legends) and they use kernel-level anti-cheating. I interviewed with them and found their test to be one of the more difficult ones I’ve taken. I’m not under the impression they lack the necessary knowledge.
    • tightbookkeeper 2y ago
      Poor networking -> need for anti-cheat Does not mean: Using anti-cheat -> poor networking Ops comment is absolutely true. Engineers in games who are good have high incentive to 5x their salary and lifestyle by doing anything else. This was not true in 1997. The industry also just attracts a different crowd, more adjacent to film and entertainment than it used to.
    • andrewmcwatters 2y ago
      Your interview experience at one company isn’t representative of the entire industry.
• bastard_op 2y ago
  The problem is since Valve and Proton made windows games viable for Linux and the Steam Deck, most of that anti-cheat vermin does NOT work under Linux. Even if it did, if you run Linux, you likely take some objection to someone wanting to add kernel modules of unknown and/or ill repute to your pretty open-source kernel. Valve knows this, kernel-level anti-cheat is simply not practical for use with Linux as a consideration. Most game companies care zero for Linux in the first place, which means for us, we just end up inadvertently boycotting those games and bad-mouthing them regardless, but hey, it's only 1%.
  • lomase 2y ago
    I think the end goal of Valve is to support anticheats in Linux. But they want the Kernel to provide an API for it, so you don't need to run the anticheat like a driver.
    • bastard_op 2y ago
      But will a canned, defined api ever be good enough? As soon as someone paints a border, someone will step over it. It's the reason security products in windoze as well as anti-cheats require kernel-level access, and why outages like the crowdstrike one a few months ago occur and why microsoft lets it (for now). It's an arms race, and no api will ever be good enough to keep a miscreant from working against logical choices. If I have to play a game that I have to assume someone is cheating, I really don't want to play that game, or at least with others of dubious reputation. This is why I run my own server for games I like to play with others I trust. If someone wants to play competitively publicly with anti-cheats, they should opt-in to do so, but I'd like the option to not, and simply play local or private instances with my own general TOS. If diplomacy fails, a ban option for the server.
  • Jnr 2y ago
    1.9% already :)
• fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  I hate to say this but a large percentage (in fact, I believe a majority) of gamers simply do not care about invasive anti-cheats. Right now CounterStrike players are mostly begging Valve for kernel-level anti-cheat since their current solution isn't working at all. If anything, this warning will actually make many player's more impressed with the game. That said, more consumer information is almost always better in any case, especially in this case considering that this is not a requirement of law but of a private company.
  • logical_person 2y ago
    Prop 65 went great! Let's get a warning out for every game with peer to peer networking while we're at it.
    • byteknight 2y ago
      I get the argument, but if that is more than a strawman argument to you, I am bewildered. Making a network connection is infinitely less problematic than having root level access to a kernel (translate to windows language for NT)
    • akira2501 2y ago
      > Prop 65 went great! The secondary effect is that business will stop using processes and chemicals which require them to carry this warning. You've effectively created a new market segment. Are the labels annoying to the point of comedy? Sure, but it's not /your/ behavior we were trying to modify.
      • Matheus28 2y ago
        Seeing the warning everywhere has mostly desensitized people to it, which makes it ineffective.
  • Der_Einzige 2y ago
    Doesn’t matter in a world of AI powered hacks. Kernel level anti cheat isn’t detecting the yolov8 model fine tuned on the head of my enemies.
• dbrueck 2y ago
  The anti-cheat problem is long-running and complicated. If you choose not to run anti-cheat because you understand that these are opaque rootkits, good for you! That's a totally, 100% valid choice. But please keep in mind: - you are a tiny minority and not the target customer - online multiplayer games are an absurdly big business (i.e. there are huge incentives here) - no, you can't completely solve this server side - elite players are insanely good - they are by definition outliers, so looking for statistical outliers is not in itself a solution - game companies are highly incentivized to work with (or at least not antagonize) the elite players (so just throwing them in matches with cheaters is not a solution) - the stakes are high both for the devs and their users, so "pretty good" anti-cheat is usually insufficient You can sum things up by saying that kernel-level anti-cheat DRM is the worst solution, except for all of the other solutions. I hope to see more discussion on possible solutions and tradeoffs - this is a challenging technical problem whose solution (if there is one) is fairly valuable. [edit: hopefully fixed the tone, per feedback]
  • sadeshmukh 2y ago
    Why isn't server-side anticheat a possible solution? Cheats can spoof inputs purely through visual output as well, meaning there cannot be full trust client-side.
    • ukd1 2y ago
      Oh it's a solution, it's just worse than kernel-level - as it's much easier to bypass.
    • burnished 2y ago
      Not an expert but I've done a little reading and basically the combination of real time actions and a network makes it intractable, you end up just having to trust the client on some things (or having to make trade offs like a client potentially not having the information needed to display the game state to the player, or choppy/unresponsive gameplay as a function of latency).
      • 2y ago
• agentultra 2y ago
  Yeah… it’s more that the anti-cheat itself provides surface area for RCE’s than the anti-chest company using it nefariously.
• yreg 2y ago
  I've just reinstalled GTA V last week and I was very surprised to find out that I now have to install a rootkit to run it. They had the balls to add a mandatory kernel extension into a game that I've bought 10 years ago and that I wish to play in single player only. I find it utterly ridiculous. As usual, piracy would have been the superior experience.
  • crtasm 2y ago
    [dead]
  • neilv 2y ago
    One of the reasons I run a PS5 instead. AFAIK, there's fewer cheaters on PlayStation current-gen than on PC, and I don't have to worry about anti-cheat kludges corrupting my "rig".
    • Aeolun 2y ago
      You mean all the anti-cheat options are pre-built into your rig?
      • portaouflop 2y ago
        Which is fine on a device that you only use for gaming, or am I missing something?
        • dmichulke 2y ago
          Well, you run untrusted code in your local network. Then again, we all trust our "smart" devices even if we really don't. I suppose a separate network would be the safe option (if you trust your router). That said, have there been rotten meat attacks using "temporarily above temperature" fridges? Are vegans just applying a defensive strategy against those?
        • lxgr 2y ago
          Not nearly every "gaming PC" is used for only that. When I grew up, I had one PC to do everything: Homework, gaming, learning to program, storing the single copy of treasured family photos, gaining painful experience in why to make backups before modifying the MBR to dual-boot Linux... Especially with iPads and Chromebooks becoming more prevalent in an education context, a "gaming PC" might well be the only computer that gives the user full control over it that many children have access to these days.
• LinuxBender 2y ago
  Are these anti-cheats kernel modules? Asking because I only play two games on Linux and they do not use rootkits. If so one could at least prevent the installation using a couple sysctl variables [1]. I do not recommend putting this in /etc/sysctl.conf or in the .d directory as it can break OS updates among other things... I would instead put it in a startup script so that it can easily be disabled and the node rebooted. This would be in the cases the game installer wants elevated privileges and silently tries to install the modules. Obviously it will break the game but maybe that will happen soon enough so that one can request a refund for the games that did not disclose the rootkit. Once these are set to 1 on a running system the only way to set back to 0 is to disable that startup script and reboot as it becomes immutable on a running system. Your OS update tools should also be wrapped to check if this is enabled, warn you and politely abort until it is unset. The failure conditions are not strictly binary and may work, or appear to work until the machine is bricked. Related to this it may be worth installing something that does checksum snapshots of the filesystems to see if a game has tampered with system files. OSSEC, chkrootkit or even a cron job that just does this manually and runs diffs. While some package managers have this functionality they will usually ignore files outside of the package manifest that may get picked up by the system. Immutable off-system backups are of course good too. # do not put in /etc/sysctl.conf, instead use a startup script or a script that is run prior to starting Steam. sysctl -w "kernel.modules_disabled=1" sysctl -w "kernel.kexec_load_disabled=1" [1] - https://linux-audit.com/increase-kernel-integrity-with-disabled-linux-kernel-modules-loading/ https://linux-audit.com/increase-kernel-integrity-with-disab...
• Terr_ 2y ago
  There are two trends in the broader multiplayer game ecosystem which I think are worth highlighting: 1. More games are trying to cut costs with ad-hoc P2P servers, meaning that sometimes important logic is occurring on a not-so-trusted machine. 2. More games are using a revenue model which may be threatened by consumer-side tinkering. For example, imagine a cooperative game that uses a P2P server, and the host has done something to make it much easier for the squad to get a drop of the Super Special Loot (#1) and the rarity of the loot through gameplay drives many players to purchase it though an in-game store.
  • mmis1000 2y ago
    Critical login happen at client machine is how fps games work at all. It's way too late to judge every hit on server due to the latency. A 40ms latency is 3 frame lag even on a 60fps monitor. And It can be a lot worse in a lot of cases. The server may detect some hit that is too far off and impossible. But it have to trust what client says as long as it is on some reasonable range or the game won't even work. And that reasonable range isn't that small. It is enough to make every bullet that was supposed to shoot on air shoot on the enemies' heads.
    • Terr_ 2y ago
      Did you mean to post that to a different subthread? I'm familiar with FPS networking, however I'm talking about a trend where a customer-machine is designated to act as a game-server, so that the company can avoid paying to host one in a dedicated but more-secure fashion. If that machines happens to be the attacker's, then their scope for chicanery is so much greater than just wallhacks or aimbots. For example, they might temporarily or permanently grant everyone equipment that is otherwise locked behind some grind-wall, where the company hopes to make money selling a "level boost". While not totally malicious, it's definitely a "hack" the company will oppose.
• nathants 2y ago
  kernel level anticheat is not enough. client inputs have to be trusted, and there is no provenance. the kernel has no visibility of inputs. i’m shipping a 100 player matchmaking game now. clients tick at 360hz, server ticks at 120hz. fair up to 60 ping, which covers entire continents. servers are metal, not vms. epyc 4244p with 2Gbps egress, 1 server per 15 minute game. mitigations=off and nosmt on all clients and the server. i love steam, but won’t be releasing this there. it’s reboot-to-play, a modified archlinux iso that boots directly into the game from a usb drive. i control not only the kernel, but the os, and every running program. you don’t get cortana. you don’t get discord. you don’t get spotify. you get the game. for the duration of play, your pc becomes an arcade machine. still, this is not enough. to play ranked, you’re going to have to get a handcam over your left shoulder. it will see head orientation, both hands, full mousepad, and screen. you’re also going to use fixed mouse speed, mousepad size, and monitor size. reviewing any players inputs will look familiar, since everyone is playing with identical settings and setup. kernel anticheat is not enough. we need a reproducible full os setup, down to running programs and network connections. even that is not enough. we need provenance of user inputs hooked right up to the game replay system, so you or anyone can review engagements from any parties perspective. obviously this should all be opt in. not everyone wants to play ranked, and whole-os anticheat should help even without input provenance. have you ever wondered if you died to a cheater or a god? do you wish you could never wonder again? i do. soon, i won’t.
  • ryankrage77 2y ago
    I assume this is satire, because nobody would play a game with those requirements.
    • nathants 2y ago
      i would never joke about cheaters, spammers, or other netizens of ill repute. if this is a challenge, consider it accepted. link in bio.
    • bigstrat2003 2y ago
      I wouldn't be so sure. Life has taught me that people will accept damn near anything in order to get the entertainment they want. If you worked your way up to the point OP describes slowly, over time, I wouldn't be at all surprised if people shrugged and said "it's just what you have to do if you want to play those games".
• two_handfuls 2y ago
  They didn't already? O.o I thought Steam was better than that.
• steelframe 2y ago
  I built a separate Arch Linux box just for Steam gaming. I will never log into any of my sensitive accounts -- email, banking, etc. -- on that machine. It's a Framework laptop so I can physically keep the camera and microphone disconnected. I basically treat it like a public terminal.
  • j-bos 2y ago
    This is the way.
  • cascades42 2y ago
    Yep, same here. I have a dedicated gaming machine because I’m afraid to expose my banking information.
  • nathants 2y ago
    dedicated hardware is a good idea, but too expensive for many. dedicated os is a good first step.
  • Aeolun 2y ago
    Do you truly expect any steam games to have anything like a root kit that’d exfiltrate your credentials? I feel if this were the case literally anything I install on my PC would be suspect. Installing ssh would be a much more scary thing than a random steam game.
    • wodenokoto 2y ago
      No, he expects the root kit will open up his machine to automated worms.
    • m463 2y ago
      I thought some games snooped through your system. Kerbal Space Program comes to mind, I recall it had adware that did this.
      • Delk 2y ago
        Unity has some kind of data collection that can be used for analytics and advertising, so you might need to opt out of that in a Unity game. I think that came up in KSP as well. https://unity.com/legal/game-player-and-app-user-privacy-policy https://unity.com/legal/game-player-and-app-user-privacy-pol... https://unity.com/legal/game-player-and-app-user-privacy-faq https://unity.com/legal/game-player-and-app-user-privacy-faq
• m463 2y ago
  so anti-cheat, but not drm?
• WatchDog 2y ago
  With the way that computer vision and AI continue to improve, I imagine that we will soon have completely external and undetectable cheating peripherals, simply capture the screen direct from the display output, and pass inputs via mimicking a usb human input device. This won’t provide all the same capabilities as cheats that hook into the game process, such as wall hacks, but it would be possible to build a super human aimbot with such an approach. We already have external “radar” cheats that use the game stereo sound to give the direction that a certain sound(such as footsteps) came from.
  • declan_roberts 2y ago
    That kind of stuff is readily available right now with openCV. Image detection has been very good and very fast for a long time! Nobody really cares because most players are honest and play to have fun.
    • aenis 2y ago
      But why bother with image recognition? And pay a heavy latency penalty which makes it difficult to implement PID-style controls on player's aim? Its a game of milliseconds and opencv is comparably slow, as is the I/O involved. Far easier to do a MiTM on the network traffic and recreate state in another process. Still easier to clone memory pages used by the target app, or use hardware that allows dma.
  • musjleman 2y ago
    > With the way that computer vision and AI continue to improve, I imagine that we will soon have completely external and undetectable cheating peripherals, simply capture the screen direct from the display output, and pass inputs via mimicking a usb human input device. This already exists. You can stream your screen to another machine running image recognition and pass your mouse input through a controller that injects auxiliary input (there are off-the-shelf products like kmbox, you can make your own as well). However, it is very important to understand that only a tiny percentage of cheaters in games end up being determined enough to go through hoops to purchase hardware for it (it's much more expensive and not as simple as getting instant gratification by double clicking on an executable). It's basically considered a win to push people into needing go to such lengths to cheat without getting banned.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• dang 2y ago
  Related ongoing thread: Why anti-cheat software utilizes kernel drivers (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42001030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42001030 - Oct 2024 (50 comments)
• imchillyb 2y ago
  Locks & picks. This is the war. It's always been the war. It will always be the war. Digital changed the medium but war, war never changes. The war in unwinnable in any real sense of the word win. However, security does not need to be impenetrable security only needs to dissuade the attacker. Kernel level, blah-blah-blah, doesn't dissuade cheaters. Those things dissuade legitimate users. It's never the ideology that dissuades those users though as they don't know or care. What dissuades these users are the difficulties that these systems present to the uninformed user. The typical end user doesn't know how to 'fix-it' when things go wrong. PC vendors won't support the issue. The game publisher won't support the issue. The game developer rarely supports the issue. Kernel level blah-blah-blah causes a blah-blah-blah. Nobody wants to hear it. Nobody wants to fix it. And, to top off this defecation-confection, the user is left with software that they paid for and cannot use or access. No refunds. Sorry. And, and, and!!! There are still cheaters on the platform. Every platform. There's your f'n cherry. This is bad for the entire industry.
  • jeff_carr 2y ago
    > This is bad for the entire industry. This is Microsoft continuing to demonize free software and Linux. If they actually cared, they would support an open source solution to the problem. SOMETHING THEY ABSOLUTELY OPPOSE. That is the core issue. Say it over and over, Microsoft _DOES NOT WANT A SOLUTION TO THESE PROBLEMS_.
• juliangmp 2y ago
  They need to disclose when they want to install malware on my system? About time if you ask me...
• wiz21c 2y ago
  > kernel-level anti-cheat Add UEFI on your PC and DRM in your browser. And next, your governement will ask you to add its anti pedo-pornography tools. And then we have a new episode of Black Mirror...
  • M95D 2y ago
    UEFI is here, browser DRM for video is here, browser DRM for text+ads on ordinary web pages is just around the corner, government won't ask anyone - the tools will be added at the ISP level, if they're not already installed and operational.
    • dartharva 2y ago
      > government won't ask anyone Wishful thinking. That government hasn't asked anyone yet (at least in public information) is a miracle in itself.
      • M95D 2y ago
        You didn't understand my meaning: Government never asks. It just does things whether you agree or not.
  • proaralyst 2y ago
    What's your problem with UEFI? If your OEM wanted to install malicious firmware they can do that in BIOS no?
• ho_schi 2y ago
  First step. Second step? Ban games with kernel-level anti-cheat. It is not acceptable on Linux. Apple will also not accept that shit further, that said Apple lost relevance in gaming with Mantle and the M-Processors (both mean a lot of incompatibility). And Microsoft is regretting every choice in this regard: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24242947/microsoft-windows-security-kernel-access-features-crowdstrike https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24242947/microsoft-window... But that is a usual pattern. Microsoft makes bad decisions and everyone suffers. Even Linux. Their is a reason why closed-source kernel modules mark Linux as tainted, the system is not trustworthy. It is the duty of game developers to secure their games themselves. Not manipulating user devices. Forcefully doing stupid and dangerous things because you cannot achieve your task in a safe why is not a reason.
  • Arch-TK 2y ago
    The reason games companies reach for KLA is not because they're dumb and can't be bothered to secure their network protocols on the server side, it's because they don't want to have to hire an inordinate number of human reviewers to make unreliable decisions on whether someone is cheating or not in their game. While KLA is fundamentally flawed (DMA and even CV based cheats are becoming more popular as a result of KLA and they still give cheaters a significant (but now even harder to detect) advantage) it solves the problem of obvious and even most kinds of subtle cheating. Attempting to detect cheating once inputs are being sent to your server (which is within your domain of control and on which you can implement non-intrusive anti-cheat) is very difficult to do reliably. An inexperienced player will make slow, delayed inputs. A highly experienced player will have reactions which are an order of magnitude faster (and in many cases faster than the speed of thought because of muscle memory). If you want to make a working but no longer detectable cheat, all you need to do is spend a bit of time and effort programming in human limits of reaction time into all your code and making sure all inputs look realistic (again, more limits). At the end of the day, you can make a cheat which gives you a significant advantage without it being actually detectable by any statistical methods on the server. At this point you might attempt to reach for AI but undoubtedly that will require human oversight or you will get false positives. So, in summary, even if you were to design your game around server-side rendering and server-side input processing, forcing your players to effectively play over a remote desktop connection (which is impractical for any fast paced competitive multiplayer game due to latency issues but let's pretend those don't exist for a minute), you will still get cheaters with snap-to-head or recoil compensation or auto-fire making a significant impact on games. Heck, there's even the idea of using sounds (which need to be pretty accurate so human players can utilise them to determine where enemy players are) to implement a rudimentary wallhack. This is just the nature of FPS games and why games companies end up implementing KLA for these games. The way to make an FPS game un-cheatable is to make a different game where cheating is more difficult or impossible just by nature of the format. Want FPS without cheaters? Encourage people to do DIY matchmaking again, DIY server hosting and DIY administration. Except that "this doesn't scale". Neither does human review. Neither does server side rendering. The core reasons why game companies do KLA is that players will pay for games with KLA but won't pay for games without it. As much as I think Microsoft is one of the worst companies in existence, in this case I don't think they or KLA developers are to blame. KLA developers are simply doing what players want them to do and Microsoft is only allowing what their end-users want them to allow. If Microsoft removes KLA, it will be by replacing it with userspace code with hardware attestation support, it won't be by killing the concept of intrusive anti-cheat. All Microsoft is doing is trying to re-design the tools to cover their own ass. Fundamentally, KLA has pushed cheating further into DMA and CV territory. This means that more obvious and annoying forms of cheating, undetectable by KLA are probably going to soon become more common. At this point the options are to have these games be console-only with blessed hardware and hardware attestation. And even that has flaws (as described). Eventually it will just be impossible to play a game in a public server without cheating. Maybe this will force people away from these types of games, or towards private lobbies. I don't know what the future holds here.
• WithinReason 2y ago
  Hope there will be a tag. I wish they also had a tag for "requires third party account" so I could just filter those games out so I never see them.
  • paledot 2y ago
    Tags are crowdsourced. I was tagging games with "always-online DRM" before they declared it on the store page, but only the top few tags are displayed, so there's no point.
    • SXX 2y ago
      They also editable by developers / publishers and it's by design. Any sane developer prune their tags from time to time since Steam recommendations depend on them. So it's not exactly a reasonable place to put something like that.
  • sphars 2y ago
    I use the Augmented Steam extension[0], which shows a more prominent banner if a game has DRM, anti-cheat, requires a third-party account, or other gotchas. Plus a bunch of other useful features [0]: https://github.com/IsThereAnyDeal/AugmentedSteam https://github.com/IsThereAnyDeal/AugmentedSteam
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• nithssh 2y ago
  Makes sense considering Valve has maintained that kernel level AC is not required and has not included one in their own games, but let's be honest, unfortunately you have to often wonder if your enemy is having a good day or if he's hacking in CS but not so in valorant for a reason.
  • ixwt 2y ago
    I'm also hearing a bunch of grumblings and speculation that Valve is developing a non kernel level anti cheat.
    • nithssh 2y ago
      They have VAC and the newer version that they promised would save CS2 hasn't exactly changed much from CSGO days in terms of results. I would love for Valve to prove it is possible but so far they haven't shown it can be done without leaving a bad experience for legit players (due to delayed ban waves, etc) despite the repeated claims.
• gnuser 2y ago
  Im annoyed at all the servile responses in defense of these bad companies. Wanna hear my conspiracy theory? Three letter agencies are using games as an intel gathering tool, and KLA is part of that. What if the CEOs are getting NSLs, etc?
  • jokoon 2y ago
    what if they do? does that bother you?
• donatj 2y ago
  Has anyone made a game where cheating is not just explicitly allowed but is in fact the game? It really seems like there could be something there.
  • figgis 2y ago
    Unsure if anyone has made a game specifically for that. But there are plenty of intentionally unsecure servers (no VAC, or other anti-cheat) in games like counter strike for Hacker vs Hacker.
  • 6SixTy 2y ago
    Whenever there's community servers, hack v. hack servers are bound to follow. For integral game mechanics? There's almost always a mechanic balancing anything hack adjacent.
• bunderbunder 2y ago
  So, I'm not really into online multiplayer, but from a distance I keep wondering if this could be more easily mitigated by altering the incentive structure? What if online games track how well people do and sort them into tiers based on skill level? And then put people who are roughly evenly matched together. I am guessing that cheaters will naturally end up clumping together with each other, and maybe a smattering of elite players who are good enough that they can hold their own, and maybe even benefit from the added challenge. And also, casual and less-skilled players can play together and not get dominated so much. I don't think it would end cheating. But perhaps it would mitigate it by reducing a lot of the potential upside. Assuming the upside for many cheaters is that they enjoy feeling like they can dominate a server full of non-cheaters.
  • JambalayaJimbo 2y ago
    Skilled players will NOT benefit from playing with others who are cheating, because their games will adapt to cheaters and not other skilled players. Cheaters will also easily adapt to ranking systems by creating new accounts or intentionally de-ranking themselves.
    • bunderbunder 2y ago
      Are the skilled players plugged into communities enough that they can just make their own servers? It would be some extra work, but I assume time spent getting to know each other wouldn't feel like a total waste, and might be greatly preferable to dealing with all these rootkits.
  • stonogo 2y ago
    KLA isn't about preventing cheaters. It's about protecting the artificial scarcity of products for sale via microtransaction.
    • bunderbunder 2y ago
      Gotcha. So you're saying that it's really about protecting a revenue model with pay-to-win elements? If that's so, then do we typically only see KLA on games that are mostly funded by microtransactions or live service models?
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  I haven't been a hardcore gamer in nearly 2 decades (think Half-Life, original CS), so forgive the ignorance; but why do game publishers care whether users cheat? I mean it's not like it costs them money--you're buying the game either way. I guess maybe in a MOOG it ruins the experience for other players if you show up with a gazzilion resources, but other than those games, so what if you leveled up quickly? why spend dev effort on trying to stop it?
  • ultrafez 2y ago
    People might not buy a game if they don't think they'll get a fair play experience.
  • plutoh28 2y ago
    A game that is overrun by cheaters makes it less fun to regular players. If regular players don’t want to play your game, it ends up being a hacker circle jerk before the servers stop getting consistent players at which point the game is dead. And a dead game is not interesting to potential buyers which affects the publishers revenue stream.
• Kapura 2y ago
  I know there are large multiplayer shooters that have or are going to be moving off of Linux soon. Anecdotally, the percentage of linux users running cheat software is significant, north of 50% in some cases. Ultimately, I sympathize with game developers trying to create a good, _consistent_ experience for players across multiplayer titles. The reason players accept anticheat software in large mp games is because the alternative is worse.
  • LelouBil 2y ago
    I think I saw on HN a while ago someone suggesting that Valve could make a "clean kernel" build that anti cheats could whitelist for Linux/Proton games.
    • athrowaway3z 2y ago
      The plan to control what a persistent cheater does to their own device is more than 5 decades of straight failures. Just one more client anti-cheat measure bro. Just one ring lower bro. I'm not sure what I find more terrifying: the persistence of the NSA & Disney lobby for subverting root control in all devices, or that so many people mindlessly agree its the right direction to go and their world will be a better place for it.
      • LelouBil 2y ago
        Honest question, since I know nothing about anti cheat development. Is it really feasible to detect cheats that are not simply "insta lock aim to some player" on the server side only ? Scripting, or Wallhacks, or cheats like these would be impossible to detect automatically and reliably ? (Without something like CSGO's Overwatch where players rate anonymized replays of potential cheaters)
• JohnMakin 2y ago
  I'm absolutely not a fan of giving a game the level of kernel access these games take without my permission. That said, cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online, and I really don't know of any other solution. What's been frustrating over the years is when kernel anti-cheats, unbeknownst to you, are causing issues with other games entirely unrelated to what you are playing - because some game developers had a bad habit of leaving them running/idle even if you were not playing. I have a dedicated laptop for gaming that I do absolutely nothing else on, not even logging into email accounts. Just steam + games + whatever video software I might need. This is my sane compromise as someone who participates in a lot of competitive games. it sucks, but I see no better solution than to disclose it (insane this wasn't the standard already). Even that is hard, because if you disclose too much, cheaters can take advantage.
  • fullspectrumdev 2y ago
    > That said, cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience online I never understood this. As I mentioned in another thread, maybe I’m just old or something now, but I’ve never given a fuck if another player was cheating. Back in the day it was pretty normal to run into someone using aimbot or wall hack or whatever shit. You would just change server or join a different lobby or whatever if it was really bothering your enjoyment.
    • JohnMakin 2y ago
      Games with ranked systems will always be cheated. If you play competitively and attain a sufficiently high rank, you will encounter cheaters inevitably. If cheating hits a certain threshold (or even the perception of cheating), the system collapses because people won't compete in a system they perceive as unfair. It isn't a matter of just changing servers when there are consequences for winning/losing. Even worse, many competitive games offer specific, tangible rewards such as items/skins/etc. for winning, which heavily incentivizes cheaters even further. I have definitely stopped playing games completely because of cheating issues - one dumb one particularly for me are m/kb players on playstation FPS games, which is trivial to stop and detect, but they won't do it. I'd vastly prefer something invasive on my playstation to prevent that experience than the alternative, which is to just not play.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• Elizabeth0147 2y ago
  [dead]
• Elizabeth0147 2y ago
  [dead]
• moore85686 2y ago
  [dead]