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The issue of anti-cheat on Linux (2024)

• ai_critic 1y ago
  I miss PUBG, but the fundamental purpose of anti-cheat software is to circumvent and curtail user freedom. I don't really want affordances for that in my OS.
• xg15 1y ago
  This article gave me more appreciation for the stance of the Linux community. So to sum up. Valorant's anti-cheat, which the author sees something like an ideal solution: - starts up and loads its kernel driver on boot. - generates a persistent unique ID based on hardware serial numbers and associates this with my game account. - stays active the entire time the system is up, whether I play the game or not. But don't worry, it only does some unspecified logging. - is somehow not a spyware or data protection risk at all...
  • gjsman-1000 1y ago
    - … but successfully, more or less, prevents most cheating attempts which would also make the game unplayable regardless. For anyone saying “just do server side,” no, it’s physically impossible to stop all cheating that way until we have internet faster than human perception.
    • dvdkon 1y ago
      Sure, but you could stop the most blatant wallhacks at least, but most times I see a video of a cheater, it's something stupid like that. It can't be that hard to do occlusion calculations server-side, right? Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
      • gjsman-1000 1y ago
        When it comes to cheating, perfect is the enemy of good. This is one of those rare cases where the phrase doesn’t hold. The problem is that server-side occlusion is only a small piece of the puzzle. A naïve implementation means hundreds of thousands of raycasts per second, which doesn’t scale. Real engines rely on precomputed visibility sets, spatial partitioning, and still have to leak some data client-side for responsiveness. Basically - the kernel level check is not laziness, but for unsolvable problems without huge compute costs or latency.
        • dvdkon 1y ago
          Fine, then let's not bother with anti-cheat at all, since an aimbot can work by just filming the screen and sending HID events over USB. Anti-cheat is like DRM: You have to make do with a compromise. Hundreds of thousands of raycasts per second sounds doable to me, but couldn't you just use a GPU and some simplified level geometry? That ought to scale well enough. It's not free or perfect (knowing the position of a hand a cheat will be able to estimate where the head is anyway), but that's not the goal, right?
          • whatevaa 1y ago
            There is a video of DYI aimbot of using a camera and sending electrical impulses into his arm to make him do certain adjustments. It's a bit hit and miss but seems refineable. It's cat and mouse game.
            • pxc 1y ago
              Is cyborg doping even cheating? At least at this stage it's still high effort and DIY. That almost makes it legitimate to me
              • internetter 1y ago
                many sport communities call doping cheating
                • pxc 1y ago
                  and that's reasonable! but it's not a given. It's different from other kinds of cheating and some of its motivations are unusual when it comes to cheating restrictions (e.g., long-term health of players)
            • dpoloncsak 1y ago
              This is probably the video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-EbjGSRyKA&pp=ygUZYmFzaWNhbGx5IGhvbWVsZXNzIGFpbWJvdA%3D%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-EbjGSRyKA&pp=ygUZYmFzaWNhb... BasicallyHomeless has made it his life mission to eradicate cheating in video games.
      • orbital-decay 1y ago
        >It can't be that hard to do occlusion calculations server-side, right? I think you already know the answer. Yes, it's bottlenecked by latency and jitter (of the laggiest player, no less), and in addition to that the maximum possible movement velocity makes it much much worse in fast paced games. It's been attempted a few times since at least late 90's, with predictable results. In other words, complete server-side calculations are a fantasy. Besides, they won't even remotely make cheating impossible or even harder! Even complete hardware lockdown won't.
      • vel0city 1y ago
        If the server sends your client "you hear footsteps from this location" then you know where they are.
      • olaulaja 1y ago
        It can be rather difficult, mostly due to the occlusion calculations having to be conservative (must count visible things as visible, allowed to count invisible as visible, or things pop) and latency (must account for every possible position within max move speed * max latency, or things pop) The naive raycast from player camera to other player would be fine for perf but may count partially visible as invisible, so its unacceptable. You'd have to raycast every pixel of the potentially visible player model to stay conservative. With movement + latency this expands to every pixel the player model could potentially occupy during your max latency period, and you need to consider the viewer moving too! In practice this expands to a visibility test between two spheres with radius max_latency*max_movespeed + player_model_radius. Now, you could theoretically do a bunch of random raycasts between the spheres and get an answer that is right some of the time, but it would be a serious violation of our conservativeness criteria and the performance would get worse with more rays/better results. Also keep in mind that we need to do this for every single player/player pair a few dozen times per second, so it needs to be fast! To do this, you need a dedicated data structure that maps volumes to other volumes visible from said volume. There are a few, and they are all non-trivial and/or slow to build well. (google for eg. potentially visible set, cell-portal graph + occlusion). You also trade performance for precision, and in practice you walls might become 'transparent' a bit too early. With all this being done, we can actually "do occlusion calculations server-side". There's just one problem with this that I still don't know a solution for, namely precision. With fast players and imprecise conservative visibility, things you care about are going to count as visible pretty often, including stuff like enemies peeking from behind a corner (because they could have moved at full sprint for 100ms and the end of the wall is rounded away in your acceleration structure anyway) so all this complexity might not get you that much, particularly if your game is fast paced. You'd prevent some wallhacks but not the ones that really matter. TLDR yes, it's actually hard and might not be good enough anyway
      • Hikikomori 1y ago
        In a 2d game? Sure, no problem, all Dota types have them. In games like CS and Valorant? Yes, they already do that, they have maps with simple geometry so its possible. Games with open world geometry with buildings with windows etc? Will be almost useless to implement anyway. You need to avoid pop-in effects so positions needs to be sent 1-2m before they are visible, its what they do in cs/valorant but it doesn't really work with complex geometry.
    • Enginerrrd 1y ago
      I actually think this is one area where AI and statistics applied to player behavior are actually the right answer, similar to how they catch chess cheaters. I've seen videos where cheats are particularly easy to detect if you are also cheating. I.e. when you have all the information, you can start to see players reacting to other players before they should be able to detect them. So it should be possible to build a repertoire of cheating examples and clean examples using high level players to catch a fair amount of cheating behavior. And while I understand that there are ways to mitigate this and its an arms race, the less obvious the cheats are, the less effective they are, almost by definition. If someone is consistently reacting outside the range of normal human reaction times, they're cheating. If they randomize it enough to be within human range, well, mission accomplished, kind of. If they're reacting to other players in impossible ways by avoiding them or aiming toward them before they can be seen with unusual precision or frequency, they're cheating. A lot of complex game dynamics can be simplified to 2D vectors and it shouldn't be that computationally intensive to process.
      • xg15 1y ago
        Fully agreeing with this. I think there are two different approaches when people think of "server side": The first is "never trust the client", i.e. realtime validation and having the server be the sole authority on the current game state. This is the straightforward solution to think of for programmers, but it's also practically infeasible due to latency, etc. But what the server could do is a "trust but verify" approach: accept data from the clients when they submit it, but have some background processes that can analyze the data for anomalies and, if too much of it was detected, trigger a ban. The only problem I see with this approach is that cheaters might react by repeatedly making new accounts and playing as them until the verification process has caught up and bans the account. Cheating would be more obvious - as cheaters would have to start over with a beginner character every time - but it could still be annoying. So the problem of ban evasion would become even more important. And I don't really see how a purely server-side solution could work there.
  • koakuma-chan 1y ago
    > - is somehow not a spyware or data protection risk at all... Don't worry, it's owned by Tencent.
    • NewsaHackO 1y ago
      The author made the most ridiculous arguments, had to stop reading after that point.
    • ykonstant 1y ago
      Phew!
  • Retr0id 1y ago
    - and, by design, is resistant to auditing, analysis, or user-modification
    • gjsman-1000 1y ago
      If you trust Microsoft with your OS; I suppose you should trust Microsoft when they sign kernel modules, right? ;)
      • ACCount37 1y ago
        It's a good thing that Microsoft has never signed an anticheat kernel module that turned out to be so vulnerable that some malware installed it on purpose to gain more system access.
        • internetter 1y ago
          for the lucky 10000: https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/22/h/ransomware-actor-abuses-genshin-impact-anti-cheat-driver-to-kill-antivirus.html https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/22/h/ransomware-ac...
          • dylan604 1y ago
            Thanks for the link. I read the GP's comment, and was thinking that was an ballsy if not hilarious move on the hacker's part. Your link saved me the trouble of searching. I'm not a gamer, so I don't keep up with these details. Whether you like it or not, the cheat devs are definitely HN level types
  • mitkebes 1y ago
    I also always hear a lot of people complain about cheaters in Valorant, so all of that compromised personal security doesn't actually stop cheaters. Honestly I feel like you should only use kernel anticheat on a dedicated machine that's kept 100% separate from any of your personal data. That's a lot to ask of people, but you really shouldn't have anything you don't consider public data on the same hardware.
    • pfooti 1y ago
      A dedicated machine with no other general purpose apps that has minimal private data on it sounds like a gaming console.
      • wakawaka28 1y ago
        Or a virtual machine...
        • superb_dev 1y ago
          And with PCIe pass through you can get near bare metal performance. You won’t be able to play Valorant though
        • Gigachad 1y ago
          Anti cheat won't run in a VM
          • wakawaka28 1y ago
            Why not?
            • dandersch 1y ago
              It can work on a vm, but for Valorant specifically it seems that detecting a vm triggers the anticheat and gets you banned. I believe this is the case for most anticheats except VAC. You can try to evade the detection, but then you just enter the same cat & mouse game as a cheater. Whether allowing/disallowing VMs actually cuts down on cheaters? I don't know.
  • zaptheimpaler 1y ago
    Except that this kernel driver is audited and signed by Microsoft, whom you also trust with the rest of your kernel if you use Windows at all.
    • sidewndr46 1y ago
      I don't think Microsoft auditing of code it signs. Wasn't Crowdstrike signed by Microsoft?
      • ronsor 1y ago
        It was. All Windows kernel drivers are. Microsoft doesn't do any auditing besides "is this the most obvious malware?"
    • Hikikomori 1y ago
      They don't audit them. Private cheat sellers user signed drivers because they have a small set of customers so they're unlikely to be reported or detected.
  • everdrive 1y ago
    Strongly agreed. Some people want kernel-level anticheat for Linux. I think that's a huge mistake. Ideally, kernel-level anticheat would be done away with altogether. More realistically, I'm just going to avoid any games which use kernel-level anticheat, even if it means missing out.
    • thewebguyd 1y ago
      I got roasted on linux subreddits for saying as much. We should not be encouraging this crap to come to Linux, it needs to go away for good. IIRC, even Microsoft was getting fed up with hands in the kernel after Cloudstrike so we may see it disappear eventually if Microsoft starts cracking down.
      • ykonstant 1y ago
        Wait, people on linux subreddits support kernel-level anti-cheat?
        • everdrive 1y ago
          I had the same experience as the parent; opposition to kernel-level anticheat was very unpopular. I think the people on reddit don't understand that in principle, linux could be made to be exactly as bad as any other OS, and that kernel-level anticheat is just one step on the journey there.
    • Hikikomori 1y ago
      So you're just okay with people cheating then?
      • everdrive 1y ago
        That's a rude strawman of the point I was making. Kernel-level anticheat is just too great of a cost. Your entire system is compromised so that you can play some (usually lousy) AAA games. I oppose kernel-level anticheat because once it's in place, it will proliferate, even to single player games, just as it has in Windows. In other words, once it's broadly supported, the number of games available to me (assuming I want to avoid kernel-level anticheat) will actually _shrink _.
  • Stevvo 1y ago
    In Valorant's defence: 1) There is a 100k bug-bounty on the anti-cheat: https://hackerone.com/riot?type=team https://hackerone.com/riot?type=team 2) The anti-cheat is the game's entire reason for being. It is the main focus of the development and marketing. People buy Valorant for the anti-cheat; they are willing to accept a kernel driver as a trade off for fairer competition.
    • mudkipdev 1y ago
      'Buy valorant'?
      • Stevvo 1y ago
        I didn't realise the game is free of charge. You could replace 'buy' with 'install', but my point stands; people play Valorant because they want a competitive shooter with difficult anti-cheat rather than the unique art style or gameplay attributes.
    • brendoelfrendo 1y ago
      Based on the install base and the level of access it could theoretically provide, I think a 0-day has a good shot at being worth more than $100k. Definitely worth more than that if you happen to know your high-value target plays League. Fair competition is all well and good, but there are other ways to do it and I can already tell you that the war on kernel-level anti cheat is well under way. There are already people cheating in Valorant, and that will not slow down. If anything, it's going to get more common because cheaters and cheat creators are some of the most diligent people out there.
  • shaokind 1y ago
    Honest question: do you segment your activities on your computer on different users? No? In which case, what practical spyware risk does a kernel level driver add that user mode software can’t do? User mode software can spy on your clipboard, surreptitiously take screenshots, and take data out of your system. That spooks me enough that, if I don’t trust a software manufacturer, I don’t install it. Kernel mode makes no practical difference in my security posture.
    • throwaway01934 1y ago
      > User mode software can spy on your clipboard, surreptitiously take screenshots, and take data out of your system Not on any properly secured Linux machine. But yes, it's generally a bad idea to install software you don't trust, a category that anticheats slot nicely into, given their resistantance to auditing and analysis.
      • vilunov 1y ago
        A properly secured Linux machine is a unicorn. The Linux desktop ecosystem is struggling a lot with putting software in namespaces. People still install software with their package managers outside Flatpak, there is no isolation of data, not to say many workflows depend on the whole user directory being available to access.
    • xg15 1y ago
      For starters: - Creating a unique ID that is directly bound to hardware. - Accessing the memory of any process, including browsers or messengers. - Installing persistent background processes that are hidden from the rest of the system. But I think that's the wrong question. Talking about the kernel driver is a distraction. The abuse scenario that I think is most likely would be that the game and/or anticheat vendor uses the hardware ID for user profiling instead of just ban enforcement, and that the "logging" functionality is coopted to detect software or activities that aren't related to cheats at all, but are just competition of the vendor or can once against be used for profiling, etc. None of that strictly requires a kernel driver. Most of that stuff could be easily done with a usermode daemon. But under normal circumstances, there is no way I'd install such a program. Only in the name of cheat prevention, suddenly it gets permissible to make users install that stuff if all they want to do is play some game.
  • brendoelfrendo 1y ago
    The way I described it to a friend was to use this analogy: Imagine you have someone over for game night, and before you play they say "Oh, by the way, I need the keys to the filing cabinet where you keep all your tax returns and whatnot." To which you might respond, "Wait, you need to read my tax returns before we can play this game?" And they say, "Oh, I'm not going to read them, I just need to hold the key while we play." And you would rightly tell them to piss off and get out of your house, because that makes no sense. If you really wanted to torture the metaphor, you could I guess argue that they need full access to your house just in case you decide to pull some loaded dice out of the filing cabinet or something, but that's not really the important thing to me. The important thing is that, regardless of whether or not I trust the developer of the anti-cheat, the game just isn't that important.
  • foresto 1y ago
    And it gets circumvented anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzIq04vd0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzIq04vd0M It seems to me that kernel-level anti-cheat is little more than a speed bump for determined cheaters.
    • 7bit 1y ago
      Having one determined cheater ist worth not having 1000 cheaters because they fear getting banned.
      • 63stack 1y ago
        The video showing one person cheating does not mean there aren't a 1000 others doing the same
      • foresto 1y ago
        Or: Deterring some casual cheaters is not worth having my whole system pwned by employees of a game publisher and whomever else figures out how to exploit their code. Obviously, our personal priorities differ. That's fine, but yours don't invalidate my earlier point. By the way, it's never just one determined cheater. Once discovered, circumvention techniques get shared, just as with mod chips and exploit scripts. It's only a matter of time before anyone willing to do a little reading or buy a little hardware can use them. And they do. (Often on alt accounts, with no fear of getting banned.) In other words, any relief from game cheaters is bound to be temporary, while harm from spyware or exploit is irreparable to anyone who values the privacy of their data. This is why kernel-level anti-cheat systems are so widely criticized. They might make sense on dedicated gaming machines, where the risks are low, but the situation is very different on general-purpose computers.
  • pjmlp 1y ago
    It is the same stance as calling Windows games, developed for Windows, using DirectX, without any consideration of the studios to ever target GNU/Linux, even though they might actually target Android/Linux with other titles, Linux games. Because somehow Proton is better than standing for actual GNU/Linux games. So like IBM with OS/2 and Windows, studios keep ignoring Linux, and let Valve do whatever is needed, it is Valve's problem to sort out.
  • torginus 1y ago
    And since the game has access to the anticheat running in the kernel, every Valorant bug is a potential root level kernel exploit.
• thunderfork 1y ago
  [dead]
• hulitu 1y ago
  > The issue of anti-cheat on Linux Is the memory of this kernel module protected from access from another kernel module ?
  • kuschku 1y ago
    That's why anticheats demand they are loaded first, and then intercept the loading of later drivers. Which obviously causes all kinds of issues, and violates both freedoms 0 and 1 https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html And they don't just remove those freedoms regarding the game, but for the entire system.
    • cyberax 1y ago
      > Which obviously causes all kinds of issues, and violates both freedoms 0 and 1 https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html They do not, as long as you can disable the anti-cheat and reboot.
      • kuschku 1y ago
        The core freedoms are about allowing anyone to run, inspect, understand and modify software. Even if the game itself doesn't grant me that freedom, my OS and drivers should not prevent me from attaching a debugger to the game without it noticing. My computer, and the software on it, should obey me, and me alone. Never should they obey a developer's desire to restrict what I can and cannot do. That is the ideological basis of the free software movement, and as you may have noticed, incompatible with client side anticheat.
        • pabs3 1y ago
          The proprietary software you run on top of your Free Software OS doesn't have to respect your freedom to modify though, it can break itself when you aren't using known versions, or when you attach debuggers, or when you are running an OS that allows undetectable debuggers.
• mitkebes 1y ago
  The author cites fear mongering over kernel anticheat, but I don't think anyone reasonable should be ok with their personal computer having kernel anticheat installed. Genshin's anticheat was used to install ransomware, ESEA's anticheat was used to install bitcoin miners on users machines, EA's anticheat was used to hack clients computers during a tournament, etc. When not explicitly malicious, anticheat software is at best spyware that's spying on your computer use to identify cheating. People complain a ton about Microsoft recall storing screenshots of your computer locally being a security risk, and yet they're fine with a Chinese owned anticheat program taking screenshots of your computer and uploading them online. And even if the company isn't trying to use that info to spy on you, my understanding is that when you're a chinese company, you have to give full access of that data to the government. With the ongoing/rising tensions between the US and China, I actually think there's a significant chance that we may see all Chinese owned anticheat programs banned in the US, which would be pretty significant since they own or partially own the majority (as far as I know).
  • ectospheno 1y ago
    I just gave up and only console game. On the plus side I can buy cheaper computers now.
  • phendrenad2 1y ago
    > I don't think anyone reasonable should be ok with Well, I don't think anyone reasonable should be telling others what they "should" be ok with, myself included (I made an exception this one time). > Genshin's anticheat was used to install ransomware You should tell the full story: Ransomware installed Genshin's anticheat because it was whitelisted by antivirus providers, it then used the anti-cheat to load itself deeper into the system. So not really a problem with Genshin's anticheat (indeed, users who had never played the game or even heard about it would be affected), but a problem with how antivirus providers dealt with it. > ESEA's anticheat was used to install bitcoin miners You should tell the full story: Someone compromised the supply-chain and snuck a miner into the anticheat binary. It was discovered immediately, and the fact that the miner was in the anticheat and not, say, a game loader, did nothing to hide it. > People complain a ton about Microsoft recall storing screenshots of your computer locally being a security risk, and yet they're fine with a Chinese owned anticheat program taking screenshots of your computer and uploading them online This is just a fallacy. Like saying "people voted for candidate A, but then they voted for candidate B!" Obviously, there can be multiple groups of people, and saying that "people" vaguely support X but not Y is usually a misunderstanding of the groupings involved. The obvious explanation for this is"apparent" contradiction you point out is: Windows Recall is likely to be an on-by-default feature, and people don't really trust Microsoft not to "accidentally" enable it after an update. Also, Recall would likely be installed on all computers, not just gaming PCs. That's a big deal. A lot of people have multiple PCs, because they're cheap and ubiquitous these days. Maybe they're okay with recall and/or anticheat taking snapshots of their gaming PCs, but not the laptop they use to do their taxes, etc. The source of your confusion is likely the misunderstanding that most people, unlike the HN crowd, are practical, not ideological. They don't oppose anticheat on some abstract level, they care about the practical reality it brings to their life. Another element is that most people, at least in the US, have "spy fatigue". They figure, hey, the US government spies on me, the five eyes spies on me, Russia and China spy on me, what does it matter?
• jrm4 1y ago
  Can't help but consider how, perhaps, this could be a teaching moment for other folks. I know "convenience reigns supreme" but getting perhaps less-tech savvy gamers knowledgeable about what is being given up when you use anti-cheat. Alas, I'd like to believe we could be in an era of "hey, not a problem, just have a dedicated gaming machine," but that too is difficult.
• Retr0id 1y ago
  > Just recompile the kernel and change the functions it uses to hide the possible cheat and bypass all checks. You can do this on macOS too, by the way. XNU is open-source.
  • chuckadams 1y ago
    Good luck booting a custom kernel with SIP enabled, and I'm pretty sure any anti-cheat will nope out immediately if SIP is disabled.
    • 15155 1y ago
      So intercept whatever mechanism it's using to detect SIP enabled status...?
      • ChocolateGod 1y ago
        You would have to somehow compromise the security coprocessors, even on Android where more of the system is open source, Play Integrity relying on this has killed pretty much all methods of tricking application code that the system is stock outside of downgrade attacks (by convincing the application the phone doesn't support newer verification methods). We can run tasks on them that only produces valid output if the boot chains is verified.
      • Mindwipe 1y ago
        If Apple launches an attestation API that has key material that they control on the hardware co-processor that it authenticates with Apple servers and passes the result back to the game server, then there's no mechanism to intercept it.
    • Retr0id 1y ago
      You do have to disable it, but you can patch the kernel to lie to userland about SIP status.
  • gjsman-1000 1y ago
    … well, technically speaking, most of it is open source. However, some parts regarding Apple Pay, FileVault, FairPlay DRM, any iOS compatibility, it’s excised.
• why_at 1y ago
  This is one use case where I think the idea of cloud gaming (e.g. google stadia) could make some sense. Having this as an alternative for linux users would be nice. It's much harder to cheat if the game isn't running on your computer.
  • dvdkon 1y ago
    That's a good idea, sadly I think gamers would reject it due to extra latency. The ultimate "anti-cheat" is playing on some trusted party's computer. That can be a cloud machine, but I think today a game console would work just as well, turn that closed nature into an actual user-facing benefit. Console manufacturers seem focused on their traditional niche of controller couch gaming and not on appealing to high-FPS keyboard-and-mouse gamers, though.
    • why_at 1y ago
      Yeah I don't think this would work for hardcore competitive gamers, but it would be nice to have as an option for those who are more casual. Definitely better than not being able to play at all. It doesn't even seem very hard to implement, steam already has the ability to stream games, they could add this pretty easily as an option for any game (although there is the concern of the extra cost of running the servers).
    • prmoustache 1y ago
      >That's a good idea, sadly I think gamers would reject it due to extra latency. That shouldn't be a problem if all players, regardless of the OS, are required to use the same cloud service with similar latency.
    • everforward 1y ago
      Consoles are also vulnerable via peripherals. There are controllers that will run recoil countering scripts and things like that. XIM fakes being a controller but is KBM. I sort of wonder whether it’s possible to use a camera to get a stream of the game and make an aimbot either by making a fake controller or a robot that manipulates a real controller.
• bigstrat2003 1y ago
  I don't personally see an issue that my computer can't run literal rootkits being shipped with the game. But I concede that not everyone shares my preferences, and if you wish to run this malware you should be able to do so.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • frollogaston 1y ago
    Bigger showstopper is probably that video game devs won't put energy into Linux support, unless we're talking about Android. Wine isn't going to translate the anticheat.
• AlienRobot 1y ago
  Cheats are why I stopped playing FPS's and only occasionally play Rocket League. I can't tell if I'm bad at the game or if everyone else is cheating. Half of the games on this list are FPS's. I think the more important question isn't how you implement an anti-cheat, it's why some types of games attract cheaters. When victory in a game isn't about strategy but just about how quickly you can click o character's head, and just by doing it once you win the game, that makes the whole game a clear target for cheating. Everyone cheats as the sniper, nobody cheats as the medic. I think you could make an FPS that cheaters hate by designing it so that it requires at least 2 players to defeat a player on the opposite team, e.g. by giving everyone weapons of different type and needing two types to defeat an enemy. I wonder if anti-cheating game design is a thing?
  • bee_rider 1y ago
    Cheating and worrying about cheating in these matchmaking FPS games is a ridiculous thing to do. If you get matched with cheaters, and the ranking system actually works, they are cheaters whose cheat-augmented skill is equal to yours. Game designers could have just worked on their ranking systems, and least the cheaters rocket off into their own domain of impossibly-high-elo games. Let there be a cheaters league. It could be fascinating, what’s fully-cheated gameplay look like? Just ban disruptive behavior like ddosing other players. OTOH, artificially lowering your rank to stomp low-level players is a problem. But cheaters, as well as just legitimately really good players, can do this; the place to solve this is the ranking system.
    • AlienRobot 1y ago
      I feel like it's more about trust. Once you stop trusting that you are NOT playing against cheaters, every match feels like you are just a walking target for someone else's entertainment. To put it in another way: either I'm bad at a competitive game, or I'm playing against cheaters. Once you start feeling like that, neither scenario seems like an enjoyable time, so why play at all? I feel like the biggest problem to me is that these types of games are INSANELY popular, but personally I'd rather play something less skill-based and more fun-based. These competitive games just keep appearing in front of me all the time despite that fact I don't enjoy them.
• fa3556 1y ago
  I feel like the only other solution to kernel-level anticheat is some kind of measured and verified system image. The whole chain has to be signed and trusted from the TPM through the kernel to userspace. This way if anyone tampers with the system the game will refuse to launch. I think something like this is already possible with systemd or is at least the long term goal IIRC from Lennart's blog.
  • dvdkon 1y ago
    I don't know much about TPM APIs, but I think (barring some hardware attestation scheme) a malicious kernel could intercept any game-TPM communication.
    • jeroenhd 1y ago
      The verified bootloader would register the signature of the kernel into the TPM, so a malicious kernel would be noticeable. You could still exploit the kernel, of course. Even a hacked kernel won't have access to the key material stored inside of the TPM, though, so it wouldn't be able to fake the remote attestation key material used to sign any challenges. Using TPMs this way requires secure boot which only permits non-exploited, signed kernels to load signed operating system images and signed drivers. Revocation of exploitable software and hardware must be harsh and immediate. That means most dTPMs (which have been proven vulnerable to numerous side-channel attacks) are unusable, as well as some fTPMs from CPUs running old microcode. Several graphics cards cannot be used anymore because their drivers contain unpatched vulnerabilities. Running tools with known-exploitable drivers, such as CPU-Z and some motherboard vendor software, would imply a permanent ban. This approach can work well for remotely validating the state of devices in a highly secure government programme with strict asset management. For gaming, many hardware and software configurations wouldn't be validatable and you'd lose too much money. Unfortunately, unlike on consoles, hardware and software vendors just don't give a shit about security when there's a risk of mild user inconvenience, so their security features cannot be relied upon. You can do what some games do and use TPMs as your system's hardware identifier, requiring cheaters to buy whole new CPUs/motherboards every time an account is banned. You can also take into account systems like these but don't rely on them entirely, combining them with kernel-level anticheat like BF6 does (which requires secure boot to be enabled and VBS to be available to launch, though there are already cheaters in that game).
• PUSH_AX 1y ago
  I thought DMA cheats rendered all of these anticheat efforts useless? It feels like the future of anticheat should probably be focused on how to efficiently send player data to clients only when they would be able to interact with them anyway. Or replay moderation?
  • Asooka 1y ago
    Not entirely. Valorant's anti-cheat tries hard to detect DMA cards, which eventually led to one of their largest banwaves. See: https://playvalorant.com/en-gb/news/dev/vanguard-hits-new-bans-per-second-record/ https://playvalorant.com/en-gb/news/dev/vanguard-hits-new-ba... Of course the cheat developers don't sit idle, so this is far from over.
    • PUSH_AX 1y ago
      I read this article, unless I missed it Brazilian pixel bots comprised the bulk of the ban wave, with DMA cheaters getting a mention but of unspecified quantities, and could have been swept up in manual and rage hacking bans?
• Retr0id 1y ago
  One way to do anti-cheat on linux without compromising the sanctity of your host kernel would be to run the game inside a hardware-protected VM. Anti-cheat does not ordinarily like to run inside a VM, because then the hypervisor can do the cheating, invisibly to the kernel. However, technologies like AMD SEV can (in theory) protect the guest from the host, using memory encryption. (And potentially also protect from DMA-based cheats, too) What you'd need is some way for the hardware to attest to the guest "yes, you really are running inside SEV".
  • jeroenhd 1y ago
    Even with SEV, you need hardware passed through to the VM. That means either running two GPUs or hot-swapping the machine your GPU is connected to and hoping neither driver crashes and burns (which is what you can expect from any consumer GPU driver that tries to hotplug). The software will also break the moment someone finds yet another side channel attack to break memory encryption. Intel's attempts at secure hardware hypervisors failed so bad they took the hardware out of consumer chips. In theory you could probably get it to work on some hardware given some boot configurations with some games, but what game developer is going to develop a bespoke Linux VM? And if not the game developer, what Linux developer is going to spend time developing a platform that caters to the wishes of closed-source, rootkit-driven anticheat developers?
    • Retr0id 1y ago
      The guest VM doesn't actually have to be Linux, but I don't see why it couldn't be any old distro.
    • NoahZuniga 1y ago
      > Intel's attempts at secure hardware hypervisors failed so bad they took the hardware out of consumer chips. That doesn't seem right. Hypervising is not a feature many consumers use, so why would they spend the money to include it in consumer chips?
      • namibj 1y ago
• donatj 1y ago
  It's an unpopular opinion, but for better or worse, this is why I think it still makes sense to have a dedicated games machine separate from the main computer. I'm largely a console gamer, so I don't have to worry about EA's latest malware opening my computer up to the world. I'm also a filthy casual though.
• Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  I found this part notable: --- Let me ask you a question. How many vulnerable drivers (yes, those that can be abused by bad actors to gain kernel access) do you think the average gamer has on their Windows install? I’ll start with my own system. This is what I can immediately think of: • MSI Afterburner - RTCore64.sys driver (yes, even in the latest version) has a vulnerability that allows any usermode process to read and write any kernel memory it wishes • CPU-Z - cpuz142_x64.sys driver has (again) kernel memory read/write vulnerability and MSR register read/write If I looked hard enough, I would most likely find more.
  • Retr0id 1y ago
    I didn't really get the point being made there. Yes, windows kernel security posture is swiss cheese, but that's not an argument for poking more holes.
    • Wowfunhappy 1y ago
      Well, if nothing else, it makes me think that if you are doing truly security-sensitive work, you almost certainly need to get a separate computer for that. Whether or not you play any games with kernel-level anti-cheat, you probably have cpu-z installed. And if you're not doing something particularly sensitive, then security on consumer PCs must matter a lot less than some people think.
      • jeroenhd 1y ago
        > Whether or not you play any games with kernel-level anti-cheat, you probably have cpu-z installed. The problem with these is actually worse. Any program with the necessary permissions can load these drivers. Some malware likes to ship known-vulnerable drivers with one of their later stages to get kernel code execution, and Microsoft doesn't want to revoke the signatures of this malware because applications and hardware will stop working. You don't nee CPU-Z to be installed, you just need to run a program that decided to bundle the (old) CPU-Z driver.
• J_McQuade 1y ago
  Was going to post this on a now-deleted comment about anticheat being a hard problem, so popping it here because it might be relevant: Anticheat is only hard because people are looking for a technical solution to a social problem. The actual way to get a good game in most things is to only play with people you trust and, if you think someone is cheating, stop trusting them and stop playing with them. This doesn't scale to massive matchmaking scenarios of course - and so many modern games don't even offer it as an option - so companies would have to give up the automatic ranking of all players and the promise of dopamine that can be weaponised against them, but it works for sports in the real world and it worked for the likes of Quake, UT, etc. so I don't think it's a necessarily bad idea. Social ostracism is an incredibly powerful force. However, it does mean that the big publishers wouldn't have control over everything a player does. Getting them to agree to that is probably the real hard problem.
  • Wowfunhappy 1y ago
    I think there's immense value in being able to just press a button and jump into a game, without having to actually know people and build up a community. However, I wonder if you could have that while still removing features that make cheating seem appealing. For example, as you said, you can have games with randoms without an automatic ranking of all players. (Or maybe you rank players so you can match people of similar skill levels, but you don't tell anyone what their rank is.)
    • eikenberry 1y ago
      They could still have this with a campaign/story-mode or even a simple bot-mode.
      • Wowfunhappy 1y ago
        Even as someone who plays very few games online, I can tell you that playing against bots isn't the same as real people, even if they're randoms you don't know. Maybe that could be improved if developers prioritized bot AI, but since they don't, here we are.
• Asooka 1y ago
  The cat and mouse game between cheat devs and anti-cheat devs is quite interesting. I saw a nice video [1] a year ago about the state of the art in cheat development, which at that point was having a PCIe device that can issue DMA requests to read the RAM at any time and stream the data to a second PC to analyse. Vanguard did end up banning those people eventually, since it can see what devices you have plugged in. I can't help but wonder if the next level would be some kind of shim on the physical RAM sticks; or maybe custom UEFI firmware. Ultimately the OS should be providing a service that can verify a program is running in a secure environment and hasn't been tampered with. That's something that's useful for things far beyond games. I kind of hope the cheaters win this war for now, to create the incentive for building a better, proper, standardized, cross-platform solution. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzVYgg9nQis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzVYgg9nQis
  • tracker1 1y ago
    I would think the Linux kernel could offer a "don't let anything read/write to the process I'm about to open" with a launcher then have that process also create a random/temp executable to test that the configuration is working... Having the kernel itself, actually deny any access... The game devs run a build without debug symbols (not that debugging could work with it on), and run with it... Also, this should severely limit what that process can do in terms of communication outside itself. And maybe a launch warning from the OS... "You are about to launch a sealed application that cannot be observed, do you want to continue? Y/N"
    • positr0n 1y ago
      That would only protect against userland cheats. A cheat developer would just write a kernel module to read the memory so it wouldn't be another process attempting to read it, but the kernel itself.
    • Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
      > I would think the Linux kernel could offer a "don't let anything read/write to the process I'm about to open" with a launcher then have that process also create a random/temp executable to test that the configuration is working... Then all a cheater has to do is run a custom kernel that has an API that responds to that request but then lets another process read/write the memory anyways. You have to keep in mind something. The cheaters don't give a shit about what they have to do to let a cheat work. It's only the legit players that are like "I don't want anti-cheat to have kernel access". Cheaters will flash a custom BIOS to their motherboard if they have to without a second thought, while legitimate players would be absolutely horrified of the idea of needing a custom BIOS for anti-cheat, and very rightfully so.
• prmoustache 1y ago
  Just invite you friends at home and play together already.
  • rrix2 1y ago
    my friends live in the computer
    • prmoustache 1y ago
      Here is your issue, get the f out of here.
• shmerl 1y ago
  TL;DR: Malware level / kernel invasive anti cheats idea that relies on some opaque anti-user blobs is conceptually incompatible with Linux and open source in general. Proponents of such junk can get lost with their fake justifications of why kernel level anti-cheat malware should be acceptable. They should instead work on server side anti-cheats.
  • davikr 1y ago
    haven't seen this done properly in a FPS yet.
• CrimsonCape 1y ago
  Is cheating possible because games are written in low level languages which have to have precise tracked positions of elements in memory? If your garbage collector is grabbing an entire arena of memory and moving it constantly, doesn't that limit a cheat to asking an API to retrieve an object because only the managed memory knows where objects reside at any given moment?
  • Stevvo 1y ago
    No. When you write code in a high-level language, your data is still in-memory offset at some 'precise tracked position', even if you are not being explicit/conscious about that layout. Games that use high-level languages are often easier to hack. e.g. Escape from Tarkov is one of the most hacked games because players can hook directly into its C# script VM, writing code as easily as if they had the original source.
• int_19h 1y ago
  TL;DR: the issue of anti-cheat on Linux is that Linux actually gives the user full control of their OS, which precludes all even remotely effective anti-cheat mechanisms by design.
• arminiusreturns 1y ago
  tinfoil hat time: three letters use anticheat rootkits to pivot into systems and are sock puppeting anti-anti-cheat.
• quotemstr 1y ago
  Everyone is thinking about this problem the wrong way. Just use remote attestation. Who needs opaque binary blob kernel modules or whatever for anti-cheat when you can bootstrap a secure boot and remote attestation setup? It's possible for a game server to verify cryptographically that someone is running stock firmware, stock bootloader, stock TCB userspace, a stock game executable, and that no debugger is attached. You don't need cat and mouse BS with executable obfuscation. You don't need inscrutable spyware. You don't need to prohibit VMs. All you need to do is configure your program not to be debuggable, prohibit network MITM (e.g. with certificate pinning), and then use remote attestation to make sure nobody has tampered with the system to make it ignore your anti debugging configuration. All of the components involved in this trust chain can be open source. There's no spyware involved. No rootkit. No obfuscation. Everything is transparent and above board. The only downside (besides implementation complexity) is that the remote attestation scheme is incompatible with running custom builds of the components remotely attested. But so what? Doing so isn't a requirement of open source. You can still run custom builds too -- just not at the same time you play your game. Seems like a fair compromise to me
  • pabs3 1y ago
    Giving users the freedom to customise the code running on their machine is literally the entire point of FOSS (Free Software & Open Source). Some of the FOSS licenses (like the GNU GPL) also include this as a requirement of the license. That said, you might be right that breaking the proprietary software when it runs on custom builds of the FOSS software would be compliant with the license. That is what TiVo did. Would be pretty annoying though, since you couldn't immediately reboot into a new distro kernel security update, since it wouldn't be known by the remote attestation stuff yet. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-the-gpl-right-to-install/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Safely-Copylefted-Cars-Reexamining-GPLv3-Installation-Information-Requirements-ALS-Bradley-Kuhn-Behan-Webster-1.pdf https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
    • 1y ago
• j-bos 1y ago
  Kernel level anti-cheat a short term curse with long term damages. For those wondering about the short term, here's a cheat that will never be handled by rootki-anticheat: https://youtu.be/9alJwQG-Wbk https://youtu.be/9alJwQG-Wbk (vid description, an aimbot that triggers your human muscles to aim faster than any unaugmented human) That solution was effectively made from a box of scraps. Now imagine in a year when some go getters package and sell it to the mass market. Long term damages are self explanatory, it's called a-rootkit
  • mudkipdev 1y ago
    This is an extreme example
    • j-bos 1y ago
      I agree, it is extreme and crude, today.
• bob1029 1y ago
  Targeting perfect fairness in a multiplayer video game with arbitrary latency between participants is a waste of energy. A much better target is to make it feel like no one is cheating. I don't really care too much if someone is actually better or worse than me at counterstrike. What I mostly care about is wildly implausible gameplay. No one is going to stop the guy who is getting a 5% gain on his ELO by using a 2nd computer, machine vision and a robot to move his mouse ever so slightly faster than he typically can. However, there are ways to detect when someone is being an absolute madman with the hacks. We're talking head snapping through walls with 100% accuracy and instantaneous displacement across an entire 30 minute match. These people can simply be banned immediately by hardware/steam ID. We can write basic rules to detect stuff like this. There's no "confidence interval" for speed hacking through a map and awping the entire CT team in 3 seconds. You certainly don't need kernel drivers.
  • cam_l 1y ago
    Or entire lobbies filled with bots with the same name that stand around doing nothing while one of them goes full spinbot, and auto kicks anyone who happens to join their lobby. Those bots I see week after week with the same accounts and no bans in sight.
  • twic 1y ago
    No need for a robot to move the mouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9alJwQG-Wbk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9alJwQG-Wbk
  • jayd16 1y ago
    This isn't exactly wrong but you're not looking at it from a modern perspective. If you can cheat and get away with it, then you'll see streamers do it. That will tank confidence in your game. It doesn't matter if cheating doesn't make you top the leaderboard. If you have global leaderboards, they will be dominated by cheaters. I don't think rootkits are excusable but if the solution was simple they would do that.
    • bob1029 1y ago
      You are assuming the streaming gamer platforms would tolerate this behavior. https://safety.twitch.tv/articles/en_US/Knowledge/Community-Guidelines#:~:text=Engage%20in%20any%20cheating%2C%20hacking%2C%20botting%2C%20or%20tampering%2C%20that%20gives%20the%20account%20owner%20an%20unfair%20advantage%20in%20an%20online%20multiplayer%20game https://safety.twitch.tv/articles/en_US/Knowledge/Community-...
• Bender 1y ago
  If anyone finds it useful, these can be added in a startup script but dont put it in sysctl.conf or sysctl.d/ as it may eventually break OS updates. Someone will say these have never broken their OS update but what they do not realize is that they have jynxed themselves and murphies law is now active. These options may prevent some rootkits malicious or otherwise. Research these options and test them before running scissors. kernel.modules_disabled = 1 kernel.kexec_load_disabled = 1 The options can be loaded last after the OS is entirely up and running using sysctl. The script that loads these options would have to be disabled and the OS rebooted prior to doing OS updates. Once these options are enabled they can not be disabled without a reboot. If giving a video game sudo or doas or root access, research the game, its developers and publisher exhaustively and ask a magic 8 ball at least 3 times if the game developers can be trusted. Are they within your countries jurisdiction? As others eluded to, consider having a dedicated bare metal system for the games that are suspect. Keep a thumb drive around with the OS image, maybe even a few OS snapshots just in case the game performs dark magic on your system. Consider enabling auditd with custom rules to watch for writes within /boot, /etc, /lib and /usr at very least. Auditd has a built in module that can be enabled to send auditd messages to a remote syslog server. If a game is doing something sneaky or shady, name and shame them.
  • ronsor 1y ago
    I will map /dev/kmem and disable it for you; do not worry. -- Your friendly neighborhood rootkit developer
    • Retr0id 1y ago
      CONFIG_DEVKMEM=n
      • ronsor 1y ago
        Hmm... Mount efivarfs, change boot configuration to use a backdoored initramfs. Then fake a kernel panic screen and reboot :)
    • Bender 1y ago
• TacticalCoder 1y ago
  [dead]
• Cloudef 1y ago
  Article citing valorant as doing anti-cheat the best way is really baffling. Their anti-cheat practices are so invasive they might as well require you to play on a PC they own completely. They simply won't let you play if you have software or drivers installed they don't trust. One step further is to use TPM and secure boot to completely lock your PC to a trusted vendor installation aka iOS/Android walled garden for PCs. But if "serious gamers" really want to go this far to prevent cheating (which will happen anyways as it's not a technical but social problem) then go ahead I guess.
• shirro 1y ago
  Anti-cheat behaves exactly like malware. It inserts itself in your system in a privileged state to monitor your activity. It's only job is to spy on your behavior. If you want to run it I don't see a problem. Use a dedicated machine. Lets call it a console. Use it exclusively to play online pvp. Don't use it for anything else. Privacy and security conscious people who use Linux desktops as general purpose computing devices generally don't want anti-cheat systems on their computers. I have no problem with the technology existing for other people. Don't try and force me to use it or I won't support your games/service. I think a lot of the posturing from game publishers about anti-cheat on linux is really about dissatisfaction with Valve's control of the platform and revenue cut. Competitors aren't prepared to invest in development to build a strong platform like Valve but they are jealous of Valve's income. Nerfing their product on Linux is likely a way of pushing people to other platforms. I don't know what they are smoking because Sony, Apple, Nintendo and Microsoft aren't going to be any better for them.
• tomxor 1y ago
  > What is a videogame cheat? [...] an external program that somehow manipulates the game or reads information from the game to provide you with an advantage over others. This has always interested me when it comes to the need for anti-cheat to exist... For instance with wallhacking, the way most FPS style game engines have always been written means the server sends all player location information to all clients, so it's all there in memory if you can get to it. But what if your server engine instead only sent relevant player location data to each client, it would be more work, the server would have to do occlusion tests for each player pair, but a bounding box and some reasonable spatial partitioning should make that reasonably efficient. To prevent occlusion lag, e.g players not smoothly appearing around corners, the server can make reasonable predictions with some error margins based on a combination of current player velocities and latencies. I know this is just one part of cheating, but it seems like all the other ones (manipulating input) is a losing battle anyway. I mean ultimately you can't stop people hooking up the input and display to a completely independent device with computer vision.
  • anon_cow1111 1y ago
    >the server would have to do occlusion tests for each player pair, but a bounding box and some reasonable spatial partitioning should make that reasonably efficient. Shadows and reflections are the hard part. Especially when light can be cast by your own/other players' weapon. It gets even more complicated with ray tracing becoming common.
    • tomxor 1y ago
      Good point, there's also sound. I suppose ultimately only server side rendering could solve that... although that is a thing now.
  • recursivecaveat 1y ago
    This is already done in Valorant at least (and presumably other games I'm not as familiar with). Unfortunately you are strongly limited by network latency. Imagine you're standing up against a wall next to a door. You expect if you step 1 foot sideways to instantly see the entire room and everyone within it. Hence your client already has to know everyone's locations in the room or you will get pop-in. You can limit people's ability to get truly implausible free information, but pretty much any-time someone is rounding a corner there is an unavoidable period of game-breaking free information you have to give the client. If you look at the bottom gif in this post you can see what a huge advantage a wall-hack still is: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-valorants-fog-war https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...
• kmeisthax 1y ago
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• trinsic2 1y ago
  For me, it all boils down to independence and freedom. Many games we're/are run by communities, but in the last 20 years game companies have moved the control of the gaming experience to centralized services run by said companies. This really falls into the same category that StopKillingGames wants to address. Games should be run/controlled by its communities and not centralized corporations. I'd rather trust the community to handle cheating for a game then be convinced that a centralized company needs root level access to my system. I stopped playing any game that doesn't give me this control when I switched to Linux[0]. If the price of preventing cheating is losing control over my system, its not worth it. There are plenty of games out there that respect's it's players. No need to support ones that wants to be a gatekeeper between your gaming experience and your computer. [0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transition-windows-to-linux/ https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...
• xvv 1y ago
  So what are the implications of having my KeePassXC database open while playing a game that utilizes one of these invasive anticheats? Every time I do it I feel uneasy, but nothing bad has happened yet.
• trod1234 1y ago
  "You shouldn't have to install a root kit to play a game". I can't agree more with the video linked by the guy in this article claiming it was FUD and misinformation. Author is just flat out wrong to discount the threat. Any hacker would want a rootkit, any nation state would also want this. Tencent has a convenient nationstate behind them, and a lack of credible history with human rights abuses. Importantly, you don't need to control and lock down the edge to have an effective anti-cheat. You can do server side checking that is just as effective.
• thayne 1y ago
  First of all, I really don't understand why some games require anti-cheat to even start. If someone is playing single player, or using a private server or lan, who cares! Let them cheat if they want to, or run on linux where anti-cheat isn't possible. Secondly, unless there are monery awards for winning or something, is it really that big of a problem if people cheat? If you are playing against a stranger, is there a significant difference between playing against someone of the same skill level with cheats, and someone that is much better than you? With a good bracketing system, people who cheat will either end up against other people who cheat, or people who are good enough to play against cheaters. You could also do things like let player opt in to using anti-cheat software, and then only play against other players with anti-cheat software. Or even have arenas specifically for people who use cheating software, for people who think that makes the game more fun.
  • prinny_ 1y ago
    There are RPGs in which you don’t play against other people but you can interact with them to sell items. In these games being able to generate vast amounts of in game wealth creates inflation for everybody and makes it so that normal players can’t interact with the economy. With regards to your other point about separating the player base it would create fragmentation and higher queues for matchmaking. Finally keep in mind that even in single player games people compete for speed run records or world first achievements.
• gorgoiler 1y ago
  In the good old days I was a member of a Day of Defeat clan. We had regular matchups with other clans that various members met through online forums or from random, public play. It was extremely rare to match up with another clan only to find out they were jerks / cheats / griefers. It maybe only happened once or twice. In between clan matches I would practice by myself on public servers. In my eyes, there were only players that were better than me and players that were worse. They could have better through either skill or through cheating — hax. Either way, I didn’t gain anything from playing against them so I would just try another server. Eventually you’d find one with a couple of guys from another clan hanging out (“[VD8 Bros] jojo” and “[VD8 Bros] dEvin” etc.), join them, and eventually more people would arrive. Someone really good would inevitably show up with very little social skills (it was mostly text chat) and we’d eventually combine these two priors into deciding they were cheating, and kick them off. If someone really good showed up and had good, friendly, amusing chat then we’d try and play with them again somehow!
• a99c43f2d565504 1y ago
  Many commenters have pointed out the frustration that even in these kernel level anti cheat system using games there are still cheaters and therefore the sacrifice of submitting to such privacy and security hole is close to worthless. When it comes to the problem of cheating in games, I think the only solution is to bind the gamer's identity to a real life identity that is not trivial to change. That way the cheater only needs to be caught once.
• qwery 1y ago
  The dismissal of the security concerns is pretty shallow. I don't know how many vulnerable drivers the average gamer has installed. I'm sure 'at least some' is a safe assumption. The issue I have with this is that although it may be expected, I don't find it acceptable. The article presents having this exploitable software on your computer as benign. I don't think that's a particularly healthy attitude, especially in an article oriented towards a more general audience. The author hasn't had a problem with the anti-cheat software that they like. This is not an argument for why this is a good solution, or why kernel-level anti-cheat is not a security risk. Further, normalising software vulnerabilities weakens whatever case is being made. The more acceptable it is to have broken, exploitable software installed, the more acceptable it will be to ship anti-cheat software that is broken and exploitable. By the way, on trust: having trust in the vendor is ... inadvisable. I'm not saying it's guaranteed to backfire, but it can only backfire in one direction. The situation in which you trust an entity with goals that are (at best) unaligned with your own is better described as one where they have leverage over you.
• anon-3988 1y ago
  just give up and go back to LAN for gods sake. Don't tell me spyware and backdoor becomes commonplace because some gamers want """authentic""" online multiplayer matches.
• SirMaster 1y ago
  Everyone keeps saying kernel-level anti-cheat doesn't stop cheating and that's true. But does it at least significantly reduce cheating?
• marthacamila 1y ago
  [flagged]
• phendrenad2 1y ago
  So many people here don't understand cheating in online games. J_McQuade says it's a "social problem" and not a "technical problem". But that's misunderstanding the discussion so far. Nobody is saying it's a technical problem. Anticheat is a technical TOOL that is used by HUMANS to solve the social problem. People get BANNED by HUMANS based on anti-cheat detecting cheats. That human logic is then crystalized into an AI algorithm that catches the most obvious cheaters. It strikes me that, maybe the problem is "anti-cheat" is a misnomer. It's really more like "cheat-detection". bob1029 says it's sufficient to "make it feel like no one is cheating" and to do that you "don't need kernel drivers". Well, I'm glad for bob1029 that they are so blind that they don't "feel" like the game is being hacked in games that don't have anti-cheat (or some hypothetical anti-cheat that doesn't use a rootkit, I wish bob1029 would elaborate because I haven't seen one yet!). But many of us have higher perception levels and wouldn't be able to ignore the cheaters.
• rldjbpin 1y ago
  still as much of a problem and only getting worse. since EAAC was mentioned, it is comical how Battlefield 6 open beta was already swarmed with cheaters, despite using a "new" version of the anticheat[1]. it gets very annoying when a kernel anticheat is just slapped on as a marketing point about how 'secure' the environment is. so much can be done at the server side instead, but devs try their best to minimize costs at their end. such as GTA online using P2P connections, and only including partial protections to avoid getting IP addresses of other players in the session only a couple years back. personally, like tour de france, i rather accept the reality that there will be cheaters regardless than to face issues like this. there are other annoyances like blocking virutalization, etc. which still makes it hard to main linux and run windows for select things. [1] https://kotaku.com/battlefield-6-open-beta-cheating-cheaters-hacks-ea-dice-secureboot-pc-2000616686 https://kotaku.com/battlefield-6-open-beta-cheating-cheaters...