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> Besides, it's a cat and mouse game where the vendor is the mouse. The goal of anti-cheat isn't to stop the world's most advanced cheaters. Those are already

> Besides, it's a cat and mouse game where the vendor is the mouse. The goal of anti-cheat isn't to stop the world's most advanced cheaters. Those are already unstoppable because they now use Direct Memory Access over the PCI-E bus, so the cheats don't even run on the same computer anymore. However since those cheaters are few and far in-between they can be handled through player reports. The goal is to stop the mediocre cheater who simply downloaded a known cheat from a cheating forum. If you don't stop those you'll get such a large wave of cheaters that you can't keep up with banning them quickly enough.

alex77456 1y ago
DMA hardware and cheats are getting more and more accessible. It's not just chosen few anymore
jsolson 1y ago
> Those are already unstoppable because they now use Direct Memory Access over the PCI-E bus, so the cheats don't even run on the same computer anymore. Working on mostly server platforms, I had forgotten that IOMMU enablement (and, where relevant, enforcement) was not the default. Consumer hardware and software is terrifying.
- cwillu 1y ago
  Not sure how that's relevant, unless you find it terrifying that owners of hardware have control over their hardware.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - dwattttt 1y ago
    It's your IOMMU, you can do what you want with it. Maybe you need to write heaps of stuff to take advantage of it, but what's new there? The only thing you're getting by saying "no IOMMU" is "I want any devices in my machine to be able to do anything, not just what I want them restricted to".
    - cwillu 1y ago
      Okay, but he's specifically brought it up in the context of a computer's owner doing something that the software vendor (and also myself as another gamer harmed by cheating) would prefer he did not.
      - dwattttt 1y ago
        And if they want complete control, they can choose not to use a vendor and do it themself, for all the control they could want. Hooray, freedom!
        cwillu 1y ago
        I have no idea what you're trying to say
        dwattttt 1y ago
        > unless you find it terrifying that owners of hardware have control over their hardware I mean that the presence or absence of an IOMMU doesn't impact whether owners of hardware have control over their hardware. It just means that the owner of the machine is able to limit what memory the devices in their system are able to access, in the same way that MMUs limited what memory every process on your system could access.
  - jsolson 1y ago
    In my world, we won't let a system boot with production credentials unless the IOMMU is enabled. This is enforced by a greatly enriched TPM (and it's willingness to unwrap credentials). We have trust several layers of firmware and OS software, but the same mechanism allows us to ensure that known-bad versions of those aren't part of the stack that booted. If I wanted secure games (and the market would tolerate it), I'd push for enforcement of something similar in the consumer space.
mmis1000 1y ago
With the emergence of AI cheating, cheats don't even need access to memory anymore. The cheat can entirely run on mouse and screen peripherals and the computer will have totally no idea what's going on. The best you can do is behavior analysis. But it always comes with chance of misreports.
- armada651 1y ago
  Direct Memory Access cheats will always perform better as they can reveal the location of an opponent before they're even visible on the screen.
  - Sammi 1y ago
    Why are players who aren't on screen even in the client memory? The server shouldn't be sharing sensitive information.
    - chmod775 1y ago
      You can minimize that to some degree (Valorant does this), but due to movement prediction/network latency you do have to overshare a little bit. I imagine that most game devs just look at the incredible amount of work this takes to implement and complexity it adds, and decide to not bother. Valorant can do it because the game itself is low complexity, the developer has deep pockets, and also the added competitive integrity is valuable.
    - legacynl 1y ago
      Although that looks like an obvious solution on first glance it's not really technically feasible. Things like gunshots or footstep sounds are not visible to the player, but still need to be relayed to the client. As far as I see the only way around not sharing anything that's outside of the immediate perception of a player is to have the audio and graphics be entirely rendered server-side.
    - mystified5016 1y ago
      Game servers are complicated and have a lot to manage. It's infeasible for the server to keep track of each player and do frustum and raycasting to every other player to check who can see who every frame. Culling out of view entities also has the problematic effect of when a player spins around you now have to stream in several big chunks of world state in the few milliseconds before the user clicks to get that 180 no-scope.
grep_name 1y ago
> they now use Direct Memory Access over the PCI-E bus Do you have any good resources with keeping up with this kind of thing? Seems like a fun topic to learn about

alex77456 1y ago

DMA hardware and cheats are getting more and more accessible. It's not just chosen few anymore

jsolson 1y ago

> Those are already unstoppable because they now use Direct Memory Access over the PCI-E bus, so the cheats don't even run on the same computer anymore. Working on mostly server platforms, I had forgotten that IOMMU enablement (and, where relevant, enforcement) was not the default. Consumer hardware and software is terrifying.

cwillu 1y ago
Not sure how that's relevant, unless you find it terrifying that owners of hardware have control over their hardware.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dwattttt 1y ago
  It's your IOMMU, you can do what you want with it. Maybe you need to write heaps of stuff to take advantage of it, but what's new there? The only thing you're getting by saying "no IOMMU" is "I want any devices in my machine to be able to do anything, not just what I want them restricted to".
  - cwillu 1y ago
    Okay, but he's specifically brought it up in the context of a computer's owner doing something that the software vendor (and also myself as another gamer harmed by cheating) would prefer he did not.
    - dwattttt 1y ago
      And if they want complete control, they can choose not to use a vendor and do it themself, for all the control they could want. Hooray, freedom!
      - cwillu 1y ago
        I have no idea what you're trying to say
        dwattttt 1y ago
        > unless you find it terrifying that owners of hardware have control over their hardware I mean that the presence or absence of an IOMMU doesn't impact whether owners of hardware have control over their hardware. It just means that the owner of the machine is able to limit what memory the devices in their system are able to access, in the same way that MMUs limited what memory every process on your system could access.
- jsolson 1y ago
  In my world, we won't let a system boot with production credentials unless the IOMMU is enabled. This is enforced by a greatly enriched TPM (and it's willingness to unwrap credentials). We have trust several layers of firmware and OS software, but the same mechanism allows us to ensure that known-bad versions of those aren't part of the stack that booted. If I wanted secure games (and the market would tolerate it), I'd push for enforcement of something similar in the consumer space.

mmis1000 1y ago

With the emergence of AI cheating, cheats don't even need access to memory anymore. The cheat can entirely run on mouse and screen peripherals and the computer will have totally no idea what's going on. The best you can do is behavior analysis. But it always comes with chance of misreports.

armada651 1y ago
Direct Memory Access cheats will always perform better as they can reveal the location of an opponent before they're even visible on the screen.
- Sammi 1y ago
  Why are players who aren't on screen even in the client memory? The server shouldn't be sharing sensitive information.
  - chmod775 1y ago
    You can minimize that to some degree (Valorant does this), but due to movement prediction/network latency you do have to overshare a little bit. I imagine that most game devs just look at the incredible amount of work this takes to implement and complexity it adds, and decide to not bother. Valorant can do it because the game itself is low complexity, the developer has deep pockets, and also the added competitive integrity is valuable.
  - legacynl 1y ago
    Although that looks like an obvious solution on first glance it's not really technically feasible. Things like gunshots or footstep sounds are not visible to the player, but still need to be relayed to the client. As far as I see the only way around not sharing anything that's outside of the immediate perception of a player is to have the audio and graphics be entirely rendered server-side.
  - mystified5016 1y ago
    Game servers are complicated and have a lot to manage. It's infeasible for the server to keep track of each player and do frustum and raycasting to every other player to check who can see who every frame. Culling out of view entities also has the problematic effect of when a player spins around you now have to stream in several big chunks of world state in the few milliseconds before the user clicks to get that 180 no-scope.

grep_name 1y ago

> they now use Direct Memory Access over the PCI-E bus Do you have any good resources with keeping up with this kind of thing? Seems like a fun topic to learn about