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Can't wait to find out what China hid in Riot's Vanguard rootkit for all their games. It's 100% a conspiracy theory, but nobody can convince me it's perfectly c
by kulahan 2y ago
Can't wait to find out what China hid in Riot's Vanguard rootkit for all their games. It's 100% a conspiracy theory, but nobody can convince me it's perfectly clean, or if it is, that there isn't an easy way to add some power to it quietly.
- jsheard 2y agoIf I wanted to deploy a trojan horse then the last place I would try to hide it is in an anti-cheat driver that will without any doubt be exhaustively analysed by people attempting to bypass it.
- throwaway48476 2y agoState sponsored actors only target a few people and they only send the backdoored version to their target list.
- thesuitonym 2y agoAh yes, that’s why stuxnet wasn’t a big deal
- throwaway48476 2y agoWhat do you mean? They burned several high value 0days on a high value target. Why wouldn't China burn a high value backdoor on a target they deem valuable enough.
- bravetraveler 2y agoGamers are great targets. They'll disable security for higher polling rates. Not discerning, gladly walk to the slaughterhouse.
- phito 2y agoThere's a ton of gamers that like to figure out how the game itself works. There's a ton of them trying to figure out how anti cheats work, sometimes to cheat, but more often because they're curious, resourceful teenagers taking it as a challenge.
- bravetraveler 2y agoOh, I know. That's how my career was started. I made invitational in CS: Source (CAL) and then sold cheats to pay for college. My first Real Job was through a teammate. Far more would have accepted a RAT and been deprived money than expressed genuine interest. Some did... not many. Most wanted the acclaim without the effort.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoBut also there's parties there with a big interest in circumventing these securities, and have done so for decades. The new release of RDR for PC (shamefully asking $50 for a 14 year old game) was cracked within days, if not earlier, of its releae.
- vkou 2y agoAh, yes, for most of us, getting our computer pwned is just like being murdered.
- bravetraveler 2y agol o l Fine, they'll gladly eat shit
- vkou 2y agoHow much shit, and how does it compare to the risk profile of, say, not wearing a five points seat belt and motorcycling helmet while driving, or a bulletproof vest when going to school, or an N95 mask literally everywhere? Security theorists are always ready to tell us about the horrifying risks of installing kernel-level code from a vendor, but can they actually quantify the likelihood times damage those billions of installations have inflicted on Joe Random's life? And contrast them to other risks that we regularly take in the name of comfort and convenience?
- bravetraveler 2y agoI'm not really that interested in chasing this, but a point I do want to make: it isn't just risk. If you want to participate in a lot of these multiplayer games that place cheating far too highly, you can't use a hypervisor. You must have gaming device and computing device. They cannot be the same. That's fine for most, but I consider it shit. VFIO makes it possible for a big computer to make a smaller gaming one. Ask me how I know. My greater point is I don't care if I get cheated out of a finals match. I can actually speak from experience. I prefer autonomy over my devices. I kind of want to eat poop with them. A little.
- kelnos 2y agoFunny that you initially used "Joe Ransom" as your example name (before your edit), as that describes one of the possible situations our friend Joe can end up in: malware that encrypts all his data and asks for a ransom to get it back.
- throwaway48476 2y agoChina's national security assistance law came up in the TikTok hearings. There's no reason to believe that the CCP doesn't have the legal authority to compel Riot to push an update with a backdoor to a few select high value targets.
- gorjusborg 2y agoCompanies rule the United States. Companies that do business in China are ruled by China. Therefore, the United States is ruled by China.
- vkou 2y agoThe same line of thinking leads me to conclude that the world is ruled by the United States. Can we stop with the nationalistic hyperbole already, and discuss acute issues, instead of vague fingerwaving at the foreign boogieman?
- gorjusborg 2y agoI wasn't being serious. Sorry to offend your motherland. You deserve all the social credit coming to you.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- PaulHoule 2y agoIf it is written in C you can always introduce a buffer overflow or something similar by just adding a little bit of line noise here or there and nobody can prove it was deliberate.
- throwaway48476 2y agoIt's closed source and the assembly is obfuscated. You don't even need to bother with plausible debiability.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoSurely the NSA has tools, people, resources etc to figure that out?
- throwaway48476 2y agoDedicated to reverse engineering every update to vanguard? Huge waste of effort. They would probably just steal the source code.
- Maken 2y agoThe NSA just needs a call to Riot headquarters to ensure their rootkit is also included.
- Levitating 2y agoThe vanguard drivers are signed by Microsoft, the procedure for which includes a safety audit by Microsoft. The driver is just what the developers say it is (as with all other anti-cheat). It provides an untempered interface for the userland anti-cheat to use to get info from the kernel. Because modern cheats tend to alter the output of kernel syscalls by running in the kernel themselves. I really don't see why anyone needs to think it's anything more than that. If Tencent needed to spy on you so badly there's no reason kernel anti-cheats need anything to do with it...
- cmxch 2y agoIt says something about Microsoft when they OK a known harmful bootkit that expects your computer to act like an XBox with a fancy keyboard (but not too fancy), requests invasive changes to UEFI that have broken systems, and have an overall opacity that rivals an Arthur C. Clarke Monolith.
- gruez 2y ago>The vanguard drivers are signed by Microsoft, the procedure for which includes a safety audit by Microsoft. Did the crowdstrike driver get the same audit?
- 15155 2y agoEAC and other kernel-level anticheat software will dynamically load and execute signed payloads at runtime. Does Vanguard do this? If so, does Microsoft check these payloads?
- Levitating 2y ago> EAC and other kernel-level anticheat software will dynamically load and execute signed payloads at runtime Are you sure about that?
- 15155 2y ago100%
- 2y ago