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.
> you should only use kernel anticheat on a dedicated machine that's kept 100% separate from any of your personal data.
Correct. Unfortunately, what you've just described is a gaming console rather than a PC. This problem fundamentally undermines the appeal of PC gaming in a significant way, imo.
> This problem fundamentally undermines the appeal of PC gaming in a significant way, imo.
Yes, game publishers are trying to turn PCs into a gaming console, which IMO will always be a futile effort, and is quite frankly annoying. I don't game on PC to have a locked down console-like experience.
Just embrace the PC for what it is and stop trying to turn it into a trusted execution platform with spyware and rootkits.
Look at BF6 - for all the secure boot and TPM required anti-cheat they stuffed it with, there were cheaters day 1, so why abuse your users when it's clearly ineffective anyway.
That's what gets me! If these rootkit anti-cheat systems actually stopped cheating then maybe, just maybe, I'd accept them as a necessary evil. But every game that has these things... still has cheaters! So as a user, you're consenting to ripping a security hole through your system, and in return you are still playing games with cheaters.
The game companies keep saying these things are necessary, yet they don't fully do the very thing they claim to do on the label.
Can't help but ask myself sometimes... why would users want to pay in the first place, for the content of someone who invests more money and leverage that some people see in their entire lives, in delivering user-hostile technical countermeasures that most of the time are ultimately futile?
What is the so valuable thing that one is supposed to get out of the work of someone who treats their audience this way, awesomely as their stuff might've been made? That's what doesn't make the most sense to me. But then I remember how most people aren't very intentional about most of their preferences and will accept whatever as long as it's served by an unaccountable industry into everyone's lives at the same time in a predictable manner, and I despair.
Funnily enough, there is also the exact opposite discurse in the US regarding firearms; where one side says: that firearms need to somehow be restricted and and it needs more checks to buy a gun.
But then the Industry tells the story that in that case only the 'good guys' get restricted, since the 'bad guys' don't really follow the law anyways.
Where with Anti-cheat and DRM only the 'good guys' get hit, since the 'bad guys' don't follow "the law" anyways.
Yeah. Anticheat systems are the "think of the children" of DRM. It's the one scenario where you can sell users the hostile takeover of their own computer as actually beneficial for them - because cheaters in multiplayer are a genuine annoyance - while ignoring anything else.
Of course the argument falls flat on multiple levels: It ignores other ways to prevent cheaters, like server-side detection or maybe developing a gameplay that is not based on channeling masses of anonymous strangers through the game world. It ignores that it doesn't actually solve the problem of cheaters. And it ignores that many games use anticheat for reasons that don't have to do with multiplayer at all, e.g. to keep players from bypassing in-game purchases.
The amount of effort, time, and money people put into cheating is honestly insane.
A 14 year old who installs an autoclicker to mess with friends or randoms online I can get. But there are fully grown adults who dedicate their time and substantial amounts of money (whole second computer) just to win in online video games?
What's the motivation/justification for spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on cheating hardware and software? Are these just super-rich people who have more money than sense?
I haven't paid much attention to any of it, as I don't really like multiplayer games anyway, but I always just assumed many people figure out how to cheat simply as a meta-game. I mean, how can you ask what the motivation to cheat is without asking what the motivation to even play the game in the first place is? Barring professional competition, both playing and cheating are largely meaningless activities outside the simple enjoyment.
A bit of both. Some very clever people, often in Russia or Philippines or Venezuela etc where incomes and legal risks are low make the cheats, and sell them to idiots in the west.
No doubt there are various reasons, some more understandable than others. There are some fascinating historical cases, like the one explored in "The King of Kong" :
You don't neeed DMA hardware btw. Just find a signed driver that's vulnerable to run whatever you want... Also, not hard at all. I guarantee you have a driver you could re-purpose on your windows machine right now.
Developing a cheat does not ruin anyone's fun. The same goes for guns, knives, anything that could be used as a weapon. It's all about how you use a tool, and in this case creating the tool is fun. Unless you think that everyone who fires a gun for fun, or creates a knife or even just a baseball bat, is a murderer?
Somehow Xonotic manages to be both completely free/open software and not have cheating problems like this. It's never been clear to me how they've done that although client-side stuff like these kernel anti-cheat things were obviously never going to work.
Combination of niche/low user base, community servers encouraging user-based enforcement of norms, and the lack of a unified ranking system. People don't cheat if it doesn't psychologically reward them. (at least en masse)
Honestly, if consoles were willing to accept KB+M (and gyro aiming for that matter), I’d be completely proposing that competitive live service titles mostly abandon PC, except for a small “probably infested with cheaters” base.
b) should’ve specified this is the bigger problem. glad to see from the other comment bf6 is coming on-board, but VALORANT doesn’t and that’s probably the quintessential title for this.
We could have a better discussion around this if we recognize that failing to stop 100% of something isn't a prerequisite to rigorously evaluating the tradeoffs.
Doesn't actually stop all cheat developers. If even one person develops and sells a cheat that the kernel-level anticheat doesn't catch, then it stops 0% of cheaters from buying and using the cheat.
It's much harder to sell a cheat that requires the user to significantly alter their computers boot process. Anti-cheat just exists to inconvenience cheaters enough so that the cheats lose their value.
It makes the cheats more valuable on the black market. I'm fairly sure the only people cheating in the major competitive games with anticheat are whales and extremely unethical pro players.
I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that it's one-sided. Essentially you are saying "Just trust me bro" on behalf of a self-evaluating company.
I'd argue the potential for abuse is a perfectly reasonable discussion to have, and doesn't have much bearing on the effectiveness of anticheat, but I understand that's not the point you are trying to make.
Sorry, my writing should have been clearer, I put one too many negatives in. :-)
I didn't claim we should trust the company. Whether we can trust the anticheat maker is certainly part of the rigorous evaluation of the tradeoffs I mentioned. My point was that saying "it doesn't stop cheaters" is both incorrect and stifling to a more productive conversation, because it implies anticheat has no value and is therefore worth no risk.
As for me, if Gabe said "now you can opt your Steam Deck in to a trusted kernel we ship with anticheat and play PUBG," I'd probably do it. But that's because I, for better or worse, tend to trust Gabe. If Tencent were shipping it, I'd probably feel differently.
Compare: "I still get spam, therefore all these anti-spam measures are worthless"
It is absolutely the case that there would be more cheating if we turned off the only partially effective systems. We know this because they are regularly stopping and banning people!
People are going to to be upset when it happens but it is absolutely inevitable at some point Steam ships a Steam Deck with hardware based attestation of the OS being a signed version of SteamOS, feeding back to a Steam API, that can be used as the basis of an anti-cheat solution.
Because anti cheat want's to verify that the highest levels of the system are not being tampered with. When contained within a VM it's impossible to tell if some cheating script on the host OS is reading or tampering with the game memory.
Probably the only workable solution is for windows to provide some kind of secure game mode where the game and only the game runs and can have windows attest nothing else is running. But that anti cheat has no access to the data in the real work OS which is currently not running. Ruins multi tasking, but assuming you can switch over fast enough it might not be too bad.
How does it know it is in a VM? Couldn't the host system make it look enough like real hardware, possibly with hardware passthroughs that the AC can't tell it is a VM?
It’s pretty complex. To start with, off the shelf VMs make absolutely no attempt to hide the fact that they are VMs but even if you do, there are tons of tricks you can do to work it out. Things like timing api response times, finding quirks in the emulation, boot chain attestations from the hardware, etc.
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.
About halfway in the article, there's a brief nod to CS:GO. It uses a tick system and the server controls what is possible, such as physics or awarding kills. Fighting genre games use the same server-based game logic.
Cheating is a big draw to Windows for semi-pro gamers and mid streamers. What else is there to do except grind? Windows gives the illusion of "kernel level anti-cheat," which filters out the simplest ones, and fools most people some of the time.
Fighting games do not use server-mediated simulation, in general. Cheating is actually a huge problem in popular games. And in fact, even running a server-mediated simulation wouldn't help with any of the common cheating in fighting games.
For instance, a common cheat in Street Fighter 6 is to trigger a drive impact in response to the startup of a move that is unsafe to a drive impact. That is recognizing the opponent's animation and triggering an input. There's no part of that which cares where the game simulation is being done. In fact, this kind of cheating can only be detected statistically. And the cheats have tools to combat that by adding random triggering chances and delays. It's pretty easy to tune a cheat to be approximately as effective as a high-level player.
Kernel-level anticheat isn't a perfect solution, but there are people asking for it. It would make cheating a lot harder, at least.
> About halfway in the article, there's a brief nod to CS:GO. It uses a tick system and the server controls what is possible,
As does Valorant and virtually every other first person shooter. The cheats aren't people flying around or nocliping, it's wallhacks and aim assists/bots.
You will find that competitive games already attempt's this, but it's impossible to eliminate entirely.
I can move and reveal what's behind a corner a lot faster than a network roundtrip, so either the server needs to give some advance warning or you're going to see enemies pop into existence suddenly.
And computing if somebody is almost visible isn't trivial either. Level geometry can have narrow openings such as holes in a wall. Or what if somebody jumps?
And that's before getting into non visual information. It's not perfect, but you could still add a significant advantage by drawing the exact location of footsteps.
So yeah, (some) games try, but network latency means the client needs some information a wallhack can use, and the alternative: being killed by an enemy that was invisible is at least as frustrating as being killed by a cheater so the visibility estimate has to be generous.
Additionally these games usually have dynamic shadows, and some even fully dynamic lighting. Good luck predicting where those could end up within a network round trip.
Admittedly, Valorant still has a cheating problem. But cheating is already less successful due to server side sim. Next gen games will have improved cheat detection, eventually leading to cheating drying up.
But anti-cheat hasn't been about blocking every possible way of cheating for some time now. It's been about making it as in convenient as possible, thus reducing the amount of cheaters.
Is the current fad of using kernel level anti-cheats what we want? hell nah.
The responsibility of keeping a multi-player session clean of cheaters, was previously shared between the developers and server owners. While today this responsibility has fallen mostly on developers (or rather game studios) since they want to own the whole experience.
> 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.
Wouldn't it be sufficient to simply have a minimal system installed on a separate partition or on a separate drive (internal or external). Boot that for gaming, and never give it the password for the encryption of your non-gaming volumes.
This is why (even though everybody hates my for saying this) - the only way to do security is by enforcing root of trust - which is why Windows 11 forcing secure boot and TPM is a necessary change.
The idea that we should allow arbitrary code execution at some point, then we claw back security by running mass surveillance on your PC is clearly insane.
The only way to go forward is what BF6 has done - ensure the PC is in a pristine state, and nothing bad was loaded in the kernel - which is ironically why their anticheats conflicted - they don't allow loading random crap in the kernel.
Not to mention, people who develop these invasive security modules don't have the expertise, resources or testing culture to muck about in the kernel to the degree they do.
As to how dangerous this actually got actually showcased by Crowdstrike last year.
Sounds great! Guess who I trust? Me. The root of trust should be a key I generate. I do not trust this to any government, any private company or really any 3rd party, except perhaps a member of my family or my lawyer. It can just be me and maybe someone I grant a digital equivalent of power of attorney to. For a company like Microsoft to try and get involved is in my view a form of aggression.
> 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.
Yes, and at that point, you may as well use Windows for that machine.
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.
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.
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.
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 _.
What cost? Unless you're using multiple users the game exe can already read all your files and memory of your processes. This kernel argument just silly fear mongering when userspace can already do so much.
Linux is an open project. If you want a closed system then get a console.
This is a reasonable stance because these things are fundamentally at odds and can't be reconciled on one machine. Either you have an open hackable system, where security comes from cryptography and transparency, or you have a locked down system where security comes from inaccessibility and obscurity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
- 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.
The point it, you don't need a kernel driver to access most of your data. Just a user space process can go read all your files and memory of processes of the same user.
> 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.
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.
This is adjacent to how Linux users claim their default system is inherently more malware-resistant than Windows, when either way you're trusting anything you run in user space with almost everything important.
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.
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.
- … 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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
As much as I reminisce about the days of private servers for Quake/2/3, UT99, CS1.6, etc., saying this is really ignorant of how modern gaming and matchmaking works. Some games would simply not be possible without public matchmaking; I don't care how much of a social butterfly you are, you are not going to get 99 friends to get a PUBG match going. Even getting 11 other people to run a game of Overwatch or CS would be a pain. Other games need public matchmaking to have a fair ranking system. You go onto say ranking is "weaponised" but, ranking is a feature, and a lot of people like that feature.
> 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.
The demand for anticheat, and matchmaking/ranking systems, are entirely player-driven, not publisher-driven. If developers and publishers could get away with only implementing player-managed servers and letting players deal with cheaters, they would! It's a lot less work for them.
As a sibling comment mentioned, even in the days of private servers you ended up with community-developed tools like Punkbuster. I remember needing to install some anti-cheat crap when I signed up for Brood War's private ICCUP ladder.
Large-player count community server driven games actually have a pretty big advantage compared to smaller player count ones: it makes it easier to have somebody with the permission to ban cheaters online at approximately all times.
Squad has 100 player games, and despite its anticheat having well-known bypasses, I don't see a lot of hacked client cheating. Why? Because I play on servers that consistently have a couple people online during the hours I play that ban anybody who cheats.
Community servers have a lot more moderators than the game devs could possibly afford, because they can build trust with volunteers.
> this is really ignorant of how modern gaming and matchmaking works.
If you listen to the people complaining about cheating... it doesn't.
> I don't care how much of a social butterfly you are, you are not going to get 99 friends to get a PUBG match going.
True, but my county is able to get more than that number of people into a cricket league. You don't need to personally know everyone, just be confident that there is a system of trust in place that would weed out any rotters. Is such a system going to be perfect? No, but neither are any of the top-down approaches attempted in videogames. At least this one doesn't require me to install an umpire in my home at all times.
> As a sibling comment mentioned, even in the days of private servers you ended up with community-developed tools like Punkbuster.
The difference is that you could have played the game without doing that. If you didn't trust the people on that server, how likely would you be to install those tools?
> True, but my county is able to get more than that number of people into a cricket league. You don't need to personally know everyone, just be confident that there is a system of trust in place that would weed out any rotters. Is such a system be perfect? No, but neither are any of the top-down approaches attempted in videogames.
I played against the EVO 2025 world champion Street Fighter 6 player in ranked matchmaking last week. When's the last time your county cricket team played against anyone who's won the Cricket World Cup?
We're fundamentally talking about different activities here. Lamar Jackson doesn't get to choose who he plays against in the NFL; if he wants to win the Super Bowl he has to play against Joe Burrow. If Joe Burrow cheats by deflating some footballs, there has to be a system in place which catches him and doles out appropriate punishment. Your "solution" is essentially telling Lamar to not worry about it and just play flag football with his friends instead.
I realize this type of activity isn't for everyone, and there's something to be said about too many games becoming overly competitive, but your proposed solution doesn't really address the problem.
> We're fundamentally talking about different activities here.
It seems so, and I think your example underlines this:
> Lamar Jackson doesn't get to choose who he plays against in the NFL; if he wants to win the Super Bowl he has to play against Joe Burrow. If Joe Burrow cheats by deflating some footballs, there has to be a system in place which catches him and doles out appropriate punishment.
I don't know who those people are, but I'll assume that this is a reasonable pairing of NFL players. Are you saying that there is no system in place to catch cheating in the NFL? Because I'm pretty sure that there is - it is just made out of people, rather than software.
Software anti-cheat seeks to stop everyone cheating everywhere, and this is clearly impossible. Using current anti-cheat methods in IRL sports, then in a game with as many involved participants as NFL a cheater might get away with it for a bit, but I'm sure if it turned out if the Steelberg Bunglers were deflating their balls every game, then this would be a massive scandal that makes national television. They would probably have to be audited (install anti-cheat) for a season or two before people would trust them to play a clean game for a while.
This. Back in the day, when you played an FPS on a private server, you'd also be able to observer other players when you died so cheating was discovered pretty quickly. When we had ranked clan matches there'd also be 3rd party observers both for fun (ranked matches were a bit event) and to look for signs of cheating.
> I don't care how much of a social butterfly you are, you are not going to get 99 friends to get a PUBG match going.
Good bot AI is the solution. Playing with 99 bots that you can be sure aren't cheating, is better than playing with 99 people you don't know who might be cheating.
My naive take is that technical solutions are possible, but critically they can’t be fully automated. The most effective anti-cheat solution possible probably looks something like a full-time in-house team comprised of seasoned ITSEC, data nerds, a couple of ML people, and a few devs. A team like that could probably pick out and boot cheaters with a very low rate of false positives given adequate data to crunch, and they’d only get better over time as they build a roster of patterns and behaviors to match against.
The problem is that this costs more than game companies are willing to spend, even when they’re raking in cash hand over fist. As long as the problem isn’t so bad that it’s making players quit, it’s cheaper to employ more automated, less effective strategies. The end goal isn’t player happiness, it’s higher profit margins.
I work on one of the games mentioned in this article and you're underestimating cheaters and cheat developers. We're doing this already and we're one of the smaller studios, so the larger studios are for sure doing it on a larger scale. Cheaters are still managing.
To be fair, I did couch my post right in the first sentence. I wasn’t faulting other devs with it though, not keeping an anti-cheat team or if one exists, not keeping it flush with top notch talent and resources would be the fault of management and the suits at the top, not that of ICs in the trenches like devs.
Always wondered if some distribute fake cheats that snitch or worse. That'd put the cheaters on defense instead of just offense. Yeah people can make their own, but most aren't.
I think this is the most reasonable take I've seen here. As my sibling comment mentions, people are already doing this. I think that - if anything - my point is that this is being done, but separately to the social element. You could get a hundred PhDs to look at the data and identify a cheater, but what you really want to avoid is someone that 9/10 people don't want to play with... and only the players can really tell you who that is. Data from the PhDs would help, though!
I've not really thought about it so deeply until right exactly now (thanks, all!), but I think doing so might have led me to a very unpopular opinion - I might be prepared to say that this problem can't be solved in an anonymous environment. Unless you have a reputation to ruin (or, say, an xbox account to lose), then being outed as a cheater costs you nothing. Again, this is incompatible with a lot of current multiplayer modes - and most of what I love about PC gaming - but, ultimately, I'd rather be judged by my peers than a rootkit.
I agree with you the issue is scale, but the scale when it worked was when gaming was niche. You can't put that back into the bottle.
The history of plenty of anticheats start with community servers, not matchmaking. Even Team Fortress Classic had enough of a cheating issue that community members developed Punkbuster, which went on to get integrated into Quake 3 Arena. A lot of 3rd party anticheats were developed in that era for community servers. BattlEye for BattleField games. EasyAntiCheat for Counter-Strike. I even remember Starcraft Brood War's 3rd party ICCUP server with 'antihack'.
You still see this today with additional anticheats on community server solutions. GTA V's modded FiveM servers had anticheats before it was added to the official game. CS2 Face-IT and ESEA servers have additional anticheats as people do not think VAC is effective enough.
There are quite a few games that are fun because they throw dozens of players into the same event. I don't have over 100 friends to play with, let alone over 100 friends I trust not to cheat.
For some games the small group approach works, but even a game as simple as Counter Strike requires at least a dozen players to make the most of.
That said, there are perverse incentives in many of the games hit worst by cheaters. Games that invent more and more prestigious rewards and titles for accounts that do well in hopes of them spending more money on microtransactions, or the microtransaction hell-holes like GTA Online that exist as a vessel to take your money more than to be of any fun. Adding upgrades and other desired items behind a gambling mechanic makes the whole ordeal extra shitty, praying on the psychological weaknesses of the unfortunate souls to get a digital gambling addiction so they can be sucked dry by billion dollar companies.
I've personally never run into anticheat issues because I find most of the games that require anticheat for online play just aren't worth the time and effort to play online in.
But still, the old SW Battlefront II wouldn't be fun without the massive online matches, and those require some form of anticheat to stay fun.
Making sure you can get enough people together for a game is one thing; making sure you can get enough people together for a game that you know aren't cheating is even harder. Most "friends" these days are online-only acquaintances that you simply can't know well enough to know if they're cheating or not. In the heat of the moment while playing a game it's tough to tell if someone's cheating or just good at the game. The toxicity of people being accused of cheating and defending themselves will quickly split apart any acquaintance group.
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.)
> For example, as you said, you can have games with randoms without an automatic ranking of all players
Good skill matching is one of the most important advancement in gaming over the last few decades. Being able to consistently play against people who are fair competition for you makes the games so much more fun, especially if you are much better or much worse than the average player. In the old days, you could alternate between opponents that were no challenge at all and opponents you would have no chance against; both types of games get old really fast.
In some ways, good skill matching can alleviate the harm cheaters do; if the cheating makes them way better than everyone else, then good matchmaking should start to match them up only against other cheaters. In many ways, this is the ideal scenario - cheaters play against each other, and everyone else plays against people who are close in skill level.
Most skill ranking systems actually don’t show the rating they use for matchmaking. There is usually a separate level that is shown rather than what is used for matchmaking.
This is because many people get really upset when their displayed rating doesn’t go up after playing a lot of games, but with a skill level that is the expected result when you finally reach your true skill rating. Players won’t constant progression, so they will show a separate score that keeps going up while they use a hidden true rating for matchmaking.
That still exists in many games with server browsers. The game just goes through the server list to find a populated one with low latency and “official” settings (ie not knife only or modded).
Works basically the same as matchmaking does now, albeit in only matching on server quality and not player skill.
> 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.
This does not stop cheaters whatsoever. Anyone who played during the private server era of FPS in the late 90s/early 00s knows this; wallhacking, modified character models with big pointy spikes indicating player locations, aimbots, etc. ran rampant, even when nothing was on the line.
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.
Playing against bots is to get a feel for the game, see if you like it and get good enough to not embarrass yourself. Then you look into moving onto playing with people. By that time you should have learned how to use the games community building features to find others to play with.
Thanks. Personally, I simply refuse to install games with anti-cheats, be it on Linux or on Windows. This mostly leaves me with FOSS games and small communities. For instance, Zero-K. Zero-K is curiously fine for large team games - you will usually find players to play with anytime - but if you are looking for PvP you have to be there when the right players are usually online. Being there and available for a game can be a way to contribute to a FOSS project too.
In some cases there are numerous public servers, which can mitigate the "player availability" problem.
Also, for these online FOSS games the servers are community-owned and moderated. Cheaters, trolls, inappropriate chats are monitored by someone who is interested in, and generally quite knowledgeable about, the game.
I am mainly into Luanti [1], which actually is a game engine for Minecraft-like games but the community is slowly expanding so we are starting to see original games. Public servers run original games as well, which may or may not be technically open source.
In the same graphic style, there's Veloren [2] which is probably the most promising MMORPG-like FOSS game. This isn't Luanti, but a Rust project from scratch (not that I care about the implementation language, though, except when its poor performance becomes a limiting factor). Played some, but voxel graphics without a world fully editable by players makes less sense to me.
I used to play Cube2:Sauerbraten [3], which is an arena shooter. This is an old game, community is slowly shrinking. Was a good casual shooter when I played, but now probably the players that still play are probably accuracy monsters but I never was good getting old doesn't help. Offline vs bot is still fun, and there's a couple of campaigns in the box. Unvanquished [4] is an arena shooter as well with an original concept (played it a little a while ago, should check it out again).
Battle For Wesnoth [5] is top tier as far as turn-based strategy goes.
OOlite [6] is a recreation of the original Elite (Elite:Dangerous is the lastest Opus). Single player game, 600+ mods last time I checked. I was quite into it before moving to Luanti because my interests shifted. OOlite sort of runs at its own pace sometimes, that is the player doesn't have full control over the amount of "action" happening. It is also a difficult game, especially in the early game where it can be unforgiving if not unfair. IIRC, the game comes with a PDF file with some good piece of advice.
I sometimes play some SuperTuxKart [7] single player. Good for casual racing. There's also a football mode which is probably like RocketLeague, but that's not my thing. I used to play StuntRally [8] before the author rebased in on a more recent graphic engine after a long hiatus, which my rig cannot run for some reason. StuntRally has a lot of features - it had online mode before SuperTuxKart did.
0A.D. [9] is and AoE-like with top-tier graphics. Didn't play it a lot because I don't like much games when you mass-kill humans, especially women - call me old school.
In Zero-K [10] it's robots versus robots so it's fine by me. As an RTS, I find it in many ways superior to Starcraft except graphics, partly because it is tuned to handle a massive number of units (no population cap). It is based on the Spring Engine, which features pleasant unit positioning; recently I tried again Warzone2100, but the lack of this feature made it "unplayable" for me. Other games like Zero-K with better graphics are EvolutionRTS and Beyond All Repair, but I didn't play them because my rig can just barely handle ZK already.
> 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.
One of the games mentioned in this article is Rust. Playing with only people you trust defeats the point because it's a game full of betrayal. At best you'll be able to get a group together once and then destroy your relationships more than Monopoly would.
I cannot agree. Getting a Quake game up in the early 2000s could take hours worth of sitting in IRC pickup channels, if it happened at all. I don't feel publishers are at fault here. I figure the vast majority of players would pick an instant game with potential cheaters over an hour wait for a 50% chance at a game.
That's because few people played Quake, it got elitist really fast. I had the same issue with it. I had zero issues with CS, though, finding a match was pretty easy. PUGs aren't a thing of the past, PUBG players used to do them for example.
So how am I supposed to play a game of PUBG if I don't have 99 friends who I trust not to cheat who also play it? How is any community going to establish and continuously monitor that their members don't cheat, while also allowing new members to join over time? I don't have a big group of friends who also like playing the same games I play at the same times I want to play, sounds like a total non-starter to me.
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.
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.
Similar opinion on playing CS on lower rank levels few years ago, felt it's statistically improbable for MG level player to have HS% of 100% on rifle while also top-fragging. Even smurfs would spray situationally hence unlikely hit the head hitbox. I don't know if these players are purposefully put into low ELO so they get cleaned before annoying higher pools.
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".
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?
Watching rented movies is something consumers apparently do; I understand it to have mostly been used for that.
Besides that, these aren't area-heavy features; it's cheaper to share the core design and just have the feature available anyways than to design it out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the matchmaking is working properly, you should be winning around half of your matches once your ranking stabilizes, right? This doesn’t feel very good, but I don’t see any alternative.
I think that Team Fortress is pretty good in this regard... at least for some CTF maps and configurations... (I'm mostly recalling the original quake mod)... there were some maps that you had to have a scout/spy to be able to get past a strategically positioned automatic gun, and even then an HW guy by the flag was a pretty good secondary that was hard to get through.
Of course, I still remember seeing cheaters back then, in that game... usually quickly kicked off the server you were playing on.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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?
> 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.
The distinction doesn't really matter. The claim wasn't that the ransomware authors exploited deficiencies in the anticheat design, just that the anticheat was used to install the ransomware, which it was.
> 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.
Software with that level of access having a supply chain compromise is not an argument in its defense.
See that's the thing, I'm not making an "argument in its defense", I'm just telling the truth (the whole truth). It might not be an important distinction to you, but it might be an important distinction to the next person, and glossing over points like this does everyone a disservice.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
IME these systems can be quite fragile in practice. All it takes is one pre-signature exploit (like U-boot parsing ext4 and devicetree before verifying signature) and your whole chain becomes useless.
And while the kernel is quite secure against hacks from userspace, the hardware interfaces are generally more trusted. This is not a problem on smartphones or embedded devices where you can obfuscate everything on a small SoC but the whole PC/x86_64 platform is much more flexible and open. I doubt there is a way to get reliable attestation on current desktop systems (many of which are assembled from independent parts) unless you get complete buy-in from all the manufacturers.
Finally, with AI systems recently increasing in power, perhaps soon the nuclear option of camera + CV + keyboard/mouse will become practical.
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.
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).
Then cheaters will be able to just patch the game startup code so it skips the TPM check. If the game executable were encrypted to the TPM somehow, that might work then though.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Capture card your video output to a Raspberry Pi, connect the Pi to a XIM over USB and have it pretend to be a keyboard and mouse, and you have an aimbot. I would guess XIMs put 0 effort into ensuring it’s a real KBM and not a dummy device.
True that wallhacks aren’t possible via peripherals, though. You might be able to get some level of info from the audio output and map knowledge, but nowhere near the same as true ESP.
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).
Generally yes, although some cheats like aim assistance would work fine on online streamed games, since they can scan your screen and adjust your mouse input to aim.
To be fair kernel anticheat can't block this completely either, it can be run on external hardware that uses a capture card to analyze your video feed and alter your mouse inputs to the computer. Generally undetectable unless the game is able to identify unnatural mouse movements.
>it can be run on external hardware that uses a capture card to analyze your video feed and alter your mouse inputs to the computer.
I think at some point defeating this becomes impossible. This sort of cheating isn't much different conceptually from just having someone who's really good at the game play for you.
Valve have been trying by training a neural net that watches every competitive cs:go match played to detect aim bots since 2017 with training data sourced from players labelling demos as cheats or no cheats, but I don't think they've hit a big breakthrough yet
Cloud gaming is flatly non-workable for any kind of game where latency matters. This also covers most of the market for games where anti-cheats matter a lot.
> Cloud gaming is flatly non-workable for any kind of game where latency matters.
Not if only the rendering is done on the client. Look at rocket league.
Edit: of course, it is still possible to cheat in rocket league, but because all physics state is server authoritative at best a perfectly coded cheat could play like a perfect human, not supernatural.
I'm not familiar with Rocket League but server authoritative netcode is not comparable to cloud gaming. All games should be as server authoritative as possible to prevent cheating from the start. The problem is the client may have more state in memory than what you can see rendered on screen (players behind walls). Running the game on the cloud makes all of that inaccessible to cheats.
People have varying equipment at home anyway, the only way to make it fair is to force people to come to the same room amd play on exact same equipment, a bit like keirin racers in Japan.
Lag is the biggest issue... even a local wifi connection vs wired can make a massive difference in terms of what's acceptable lag.
Of course, to TFA's point on network code... a lot of the issues in question could come down to checking for movements that exceed human... moving faster than the speed in game, or even twitch aiming movements faster than a mouse, or a consistent level of X accuracy in shooting over time. On the last part, I'm not sure if there might be some way to mask a user's hit zone, rendering and such so that an aim-bot thinks the foot is center-mass, etc. Or if it could be randomly shifted in a test scenario.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> Vanguard did end up banning those people eventually, since it can see what devices you have plugged in.
Only because the makers of those DMA cards do a bad job hiding themselves. They either use vague, recognisable names, or don't act like the devices they're spoofing.
The moment a cheat developer manages to reprogram an actual SSD (especially a common model), hardware detection like that becomes near impossible.
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"
> 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.
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.
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.
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 (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
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.
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.
… well, technically speaking, most of it is open source. However, some parts regarding Apple Pay, FileVault, FairPlay DRM, any iOS compatibility, it’s excised.
Right, but you can splice your recompiled version back into the original binary, complete with proprietary components. I've done this before, maybe I should write up the process.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The userland software, sure. But all kernel modules and drivers need to obey my freedoms for me to be able to ever trust the system again.
I'd end up in court if I gave a random game developer root permissions on the same system that I use for client projects. But installing a kernel module is fine?
If the valorant module wanted, it could intercept anything from that point on. It could intercept me trying to uninstall it, and pretend it had been removed, while just hiding itself. It could intercept any debugging I'd be trying to do, and feed me false data.
That's why I don't use proprietary kernel modules, and never run proprietary code with root permissions.
And I shouldn't have to. Games don't need client side anticheat.
Why do even many single player games now ship with anti-cheat? Because they want to protect their lootboxes and microtransactions.
And even competitive games don't need client side anti-cheat. Most games are perfectly fine with a well-written server-side anticheat, and the ones that don't work fine if you host a private server with people you know.
No other part of IT would ever trust the client. Giving the client information they shouldn't have is an instant CVE, and so is relying on client-side validation.
But client-side anticheat is cheaper, and matchmaking increases engagement, so alternatives are dismissed.
I don't want to play with randoms. Even in mmorpgs I prefer finding a group via the zone chat, which also encourages finding a guild and making friendships, over playing with randoms. Especially if the matchmaking doesn't even take party roles into account.
So why should I break my clients' trust to give control of my system to someone I don't know to install software I don't want just so I can play a game with matchmaking just because the developer didn't want to pay for proper server-side anticheat?
"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.
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.
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.
Of these, #4 seems least awful and maximally user freedom preserving. Unlike regular Tivoization, also, we're not talking about locking down the whole machine. No need. You basically just need to attest the kernel and some binary signing infrastructure. You can run custom builds of whatever else you want otherwise.
I mean, or you can run a trusted VM, as some others have suggested. Is that really any worse?
Another option is to use servers that do not require the anti-cheating, or to play vs others who do not require the anti-cheating, or to use a local network with dedicated computers for this purpose, or games that do not have these features, or only play vs other trusted players within a group that you trust.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> you should only use kernel anticheat on a dedicated machine that's kept 100% separate from any of your personal data.
Correct. Unfortunately, what you've just described is a gaming console rather than a PC. This problem fundamentally undermines the appeal of PC gaming in a significant way, imo.
> This problem fundamentally undermines the appeal of PC gaming in a significant way, imo.
Yes, game publishers are trying to turn PCs into a gaming console, which IMO will always be a futile effort, and is quite frankly annoying. I don't game on PC to have a locked down console-like experience.
Just embrace the PC for what it is and stop trying to turn it into a trusted execution platform with spyware and rootkits.
Look at BF6 - for all the secure boot and TPM required anti-cheat they stuffed it with, there were cheaters day 1, so why abuse your users when it's clearly ineffective anyway.
That's what gets me! If these rootkit anti-cheat systems actually stopped cheating then maybe, just maybe, I'd accept them as a necessary evil. But every game that has these things... still has cheaters! So as a user, you're consenting to ripping a security hole through your system, and in return you are still playing games with cheaters.
The game companies keep saying these things are necessary, yet they don't fully do the very thing they claim to do on the label.
I can't put a finger on it but that tastes like the copyright/DRM situation in reverse.
Not even in reverse, this is literally DRM.
Can't help but ask myself sometimes... why would users want to pay in the first place, for the content of someone who invests more money and leverage that some people see in their entire lives, in delivering user-hostile technical countermeasures that most of the time are ultimately futile?
What is the so valuable thing that one is supposed to get out of the work of someone who treats their audience this way, awesomely as their stuff might've been made? That's what doesn't make the most sense to me. But then I remember how most people aren't very intentional about most of their preferences and will accept whatever as long as it's served by an unaccountable industry into everyone's lives at the same time in a predictable manner, and I despair.
Funnily enough, there is also the exact opposite discurse in the US regarding firearms; where one side says: that firearms need to somehow be restricted and and it needs more checks to buy a gun. But then the Industry tells the story that in that case only the 'good guys' get restricted, since the 'bad guys' don't really follow the law anyways.
Where with Anti-cheat and DRM only the 'good guys' get hit, since the 'bad guys' don't follow "the law" anyways.
Yeah. Anticheat systems are the "think of the children" of DRM. It's the one scenario where you can sell users the hostile takeover of their own computer as actually beneficial for them - because cheaters in multiplayer are a genuine annoyance - while ignoring anything else.
Of course the argument falls flat on multiple levels: It ignores other ways to prevent cheaters, like server-side detection or maybe developing a gameplay that is not based on channeling masses of anonymous strangers through the game world. It ignores that it doesn't actually solve the problem of cheaters. And it ignores that many games use anticheat for reasons that don't have to do with multiplayer at all, e.g. to keep players from bypassing in-game purchases.
How are the cheaters getting around it?
Some use dedicated custom hardware, or a second PC, like this:
https://www.dma-cheats.com/
The amount of effort, time, and money people put into cheating is honestly insane.
A 14 year old who installs an autoclicker to mess with friends or randoms online I can get. But there are fully grown adults who dedicate their time and substantial amounts of money (whole second computer) just to win in online video games?
What's the motivation/justification for spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on cheating hardware and software? Are these just super-rich people who have more money than sense?
I haven't paid much attention to any of it, as I don't really like multiplayer games anyway, but I always just assumed many people figure out how to cheat simply as a meta-game. I mean, how can you ask what the motivation to cheat is without asking what the motivation to even play the game in the first place is? Barring professional competition, both playing and cheating are largely meaningless activities outside the simple enjoyment.
A bit of both. Some very clever people, often in Russia or Philippines or Venezuela etc where incomes and legal risks are low make the cheats, and sell them to idiots in the west.
> What's the motivation/justification...
No doubt there are various reasons, some more understandable than others. There are some fascinating historical cases, like the one explored in "The King of Kong" :
https://youtu.be/_4v15X8Px34
Which is well worth a watch, if you're curious.
You don't neeed DMA hardware btw. Just find a signed driver that's vulnerable to run whatever you want... Also, not hard at all. I guarantee you have a driver you could re-purpose on your windows machine right now.
do you not have any hobbies? cheat development is insanely fun
Of course I have hobbies, and they cost me money. I just make sure my hobbies aren't ruining the fun for everyone around me.
Developing a cheat does not ruin anyone's fun. The same goes for guns, knives, anything that could be used as a weapon. It's all about how you use a tool, and in this case creating the tool is fun. Unless you think that everyone who fires a gun for fun, or creates a knife or even just a baseball bat, is a murderer?
So people develop cheats only to not use them in public games, and not distribute them to others?
No idea what other people do, you'd have to ask them.
Seems like they all develop cheats to cheat
Somehow Xonotic manages to be both completely free/open software and not have cheating problems like this. It's never been clear to me how they've done that although client-side stuff like these kernel anti-cheat things were obviously never going to work.
Combination of niche/low user base, community servers encouraging user-based enforcement of norms, and the lack of a unified ranking system. People don't cheat if it doesn't psychologically reward them. (at least en masse)
Honestly, if consoles were willing to accept KB+M (and gyro aiming for that matter), I’d be completely proposing that competitive live service titles mostly abandon PC, except for a small “probably infested with cheaters” base.
It’s happening! https://www.dualshockers.com/battlefield-6-will-support-keyb...
XBox consoles do in fact support KB+M, though not all games support it.
a) are they now supporting any KB+M peripheral?
b) should’ve specified this is the bigger problem. glad to see from the other comment bf6 is coming on-board, but VALORANT doesn’t and that’s probably the quintessential title for this.
Stream console output to pc, use AI to detect enemies, manipulate mouse and keyboard input to aimbot, even consoles aren’t safe
> doesn't actually stop cheaters.
doesn't actually stop all cheaters.
We could have a better discussion around this if we recognize that failing to stop 100% of something isn't a prerequisite to rigorously evaluating the tradeoffs.
Doesn't actually stop all cheat developers. If even one person develops and sells a cheat that the kernel-level anticheat doesn't catch, then it stops 0% of cheaters from buying and using the cheat.
It's much harder to sell a cheat that requires the user to significantly alter their computers boot process. Anti-cheat just exists to inconvenience cheaters enough so that the cheats lose their value.
It makes the cheats more valuable on the black market. I'm fairly sure the only people cheating in the major competitive games with anticheat are whales and extremely unethical pro players.
If that's the case then why not only have kernel level anti-cheat enforced for the leagues and the tournaments?
Because then a lot more people would cheat outside of leagues and tournaments.
That's not really true if the exploit requires soldering on to RAM pins and executing on a second, independent machine.
I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that it's one-sided. Essentially you are saying "Just trust me bro" on behalf of a self-evaluating company.
I'd argue the potential for abuse is a perfectly reasonable discussion to have, and doesn't have much bearing on the effectiveness of anticheat, but I understand that's not the point you are trying to make.
Sorry, my writing should have been clearer, I put one too many negatives in. :-)
I didn't claim we should trust the company. Whether we can trust the anticheat maker is certainly part of the rigorous evaluation of the tradeoffs I mentioned. My point was that saying "it doesn't stop cheaters" is both incorrect and stifling to a more productive conversation, because it implies anticheat has no value and is therefore worth no risk.
As for me, if Gabe said "now you can opt your Steam Deck in to a trusted kernel we ship with anticheat and play PUBG," I'd probably do it. But that's because I, for better or worse, tend to trust Gabe. If Tencent were shipping it, I'd probably feel differently.
Compare: "I still get spam, therefore all these anti-spam measures are worthless"
It is absolutely the case that there would be more cheating if we turned off the only partially effective systems. We know this because they are regularly stopping and banning people!
People are going to to be upset when it happens but it is absolutely inevitable at some point Steam ships a Steam Deck with hardware based attestation of the OS being a signed version of SteamOS, feeding back to a Steam API, that can be used as the basis of an anti-cheat solution.
A dedicated machine with no other general purpose apps that has minimal private data on it sounds like a gaming console.
Or a virtual machine...
And with PCIe pass through you can get near bare metal performance. You won’t be able to play Valorant though
Anti cheat won't run in a VM
Flip it. Run the games on bare metal with nothing on it but games and a VM. use the VM for your personal system.
That achieves nothing. A hypervisor can see and manipulate any VM it runs. By extension, a compromised kernel can do the same.
On Android this isn't true with support for protected virtual machines.
How about with homomorphic encryption?
I’m not aware of any OS that supports it for this use case.
Not with that attitude!
Why not?
Because anti cheat want's to verify that the highest levels of the system are not being tampered with. When contained within a VM it's impossible to tell if some cheating script on the host OS is reading or tampering with the game memory.
Probably the only workable solution is for windows to provide some kind of secure game mode where the game and only the game runs and can have windows attest nothing else is running. But that anti cheat has no access to the data in the real work OS which is currently not running. Ruins multi tasking, but assuming you can switch over fast enough it might not be too bad.
How does it know it is in a VM? Couldn't the host system make it look enough like real hardware, possibly with hardware passthroughs that the AC can't tell it is a VM?
It’s pretty complex. To start with, off the shelf VMs make absolutely no attempt to hide the fact that they are VMs but even if you do, there are tons of tricks you can do to work it out. Things like timing api response times, finding quirks in the emulation, boot chain attestations from the hardware, etc.
I've read that they specifically look for this by finding RDTSC timestamps, which would include (?) the overhead of the hypercall or something.
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.
About halfway in the article, there's a brief nod to CS:GO. It uses a tick system and the server controls what is possible, such as physics or awarding kills. Fighting genre games use the same server-based game logic.
Cheating is a big draw to Windows for semi-pro gamers and mid streamers. What else is there to do except grind? Windows gives the illusion of "kernel level anti-cheat," which filters out the simplest ones, and fools most people some of the time.
Fighting games do not use server-mediated simulation, in general. Cheating is actually a huge problem in popular games. And in fact, even running a server-mediated simulation wouldn't help with any of the common cheating in fighting games.
For instance, a common cheat in Street Fighter 6 is to trigger a drive impact in response to the startup of a move that is unsafe to a drive impact. That is recognizing the opponent's animation and triggering an input. There's no part of that which cares where the game simulation is being done. In fact, this kind of cheating can only be detected statistically. And the cheats have tools to combat that by adding random triggering chances and delays. It's pretty easy to tune a cheat to be approximately as effective as a high-level player.
Kernel-level anticheat isn't a perfect solution, but there are people asking for it. It would make cheating a lot harder, at least.
> About halfway in the article, there's a brief nod to CS:GO. It uses a tick system and the server controls what is possible,
As does Valorant and virtually every other first person shooter. The cheats aren't people flying around or nocliping, it's wallhacks and aim assists/bots.
Wallhacks depend on the server giving the client information the client shouldn't have.
You will find that competitive games already attempt's this, but it's impossible to eliminate entirely.
I can move and reveal what's behind a corner a lot faster than a network roundtrip, so either the server needs to give some advance warning or you're going to see enemies pop into existence suddenly.
And computing if somebody is almost visible isn't trivial either. Level geometry can have narrow openings such as holes in a wall. Or what if somebody jumps?
And that's before getting into non visual information. It's not perfect, but you could still add a significant advantage by drawing the exact location of footsteps.
So yeah, (some) games try, but network latency means the client needs some information a wallhack can use, and the alternative: being killed by an enemy that was invisible is at least as frustrating as being killed by a cheater so the visibility estimate has to be generous.
Additionally these games usually have dynamic shadows, and some even fully dynamic lighting. Good luck predicting where those could end up within a network round trip.
Admittedly, Valorant still has a cheating problem. But cheating is already less successful due to server side sim. Next gen games will have improved cheat detection, eventually leading to cheating drying up.
I fundamentally agree with you.
But anti-cheat hasn't been about blocking every possible way of cheating for some time now. It's been about making it as in convenient as possible, thus reducing the amount of cheaters.
Is the current fad of using kernel level anti-cheats what we want? hell nah.
The responsibility of keeping a multi-player session clean of cheaters, was previously shared between the developers and server owners. While today this responsibility has fallen mostly on developers (or rather game studios) since they want to own the whole experience.
> 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.
Wouldn't it be sufficient to simply have a minimal system installed on a separate partition or on a separate drive (internal or external). Boot that for gaming, and never give it the password for the encryption of your non-gaming volumes.
This is why (even though everybody hates my for saying this) - the only way to do security is by enforcing root of trust - which is why Windows 11 forcing secure boot and TPM is a necessary change.
The idea that we should allow arbitrary code execution at some point, then we claw back security by running mass surveillance on your PC is clearly insane.
The only way to go forward is what BF6 has done - ensure the PC is in a pristine state, and nothing bad was loaded in the kernel - which is ironically why their anticheats conflicted - they don't allow loading random crap in the kernel.
Not to mention, people who develop these invasive security modules don't have the expertise, resources or testing culture to muck about in the kernel to the degree they do.
As to how dangerous this actually got actually showcased by Crowdstrike last year.
Sounds great! Guess who I trust? Me. The root of trust should be a key I generate. I do not trust this to any government, any private company or really any 3rd party, except perhaps a member of my family or my lawyer. It can just be me and maybe someone I grant a digital equivalent of power of attorney to. For a company like Microsoft to try and get involved is in my view a form of aggression.
I hope you run a globally recognized certificate authorithy then...
Why not dual boot, and keep your files on an encrypted partition?
> 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.
Yes, and at that point, you may as well use Windows for that machine.
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.
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.
Wait, people on linux subreddits support kernel-level anti-cheat?
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.
So you're just okay with people cheating then?
This sounds a lot like anti-encryption rhetoric: "so are you just okay with terrorists / pedophiles / pirates then?".
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 _.
What cost? Unless you're using multiple users the game exe can already read all your files and memory of your processes. This kernel argument just silly fear mongering when userspace can already do so much.
I think the point the other poster was trying to make is that nobody explicitly wants anti cheat — likely including the game devs.
But the alternative is cheaters in the game, which your point doesn’t really address. So for many it is a necessary evil, so to speak.
Linux is an open project. If you want a closed system then get a console.
This is a reasonable stance because these things are fundamentally at odds and can't be reconciled on one machine. Either you have an open hackable system, where security comes from cryptography and transparency, or you have a locked down system where security comes from inaccessibility and obscurity.
> - is somehow not a spyware or data protection risk at all...
Don't worry, it's owned by Tencent.
The author made the most ridiculous arguments, had to stop reading after that point.
Phew!
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.
In Valorant's defence:
1) There is a 100k bug-bounty on the anti-cheat: 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.
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.
'Buy valorant'?
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.
- and, by design, is resistant to auditing, analysis, or user-modification
If you trust Microsoft with your OS; I suppose you should trust Microsoft when they sign kernel modules, right? ;)
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.
for the lucky 10000: https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/22/h/ransomware-ac...
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
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.
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.
The point it, you don't need a kernel driver to access most of your data. Just a user space process can go read all your files and memory of processes of the same user.
Yes. But I normally wouldn't install such a user space process either, if I can avoid it. Anticheat is trying to normalize that behavior.
Like a game?
> 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.
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.
This is adjacent to how Linux users claim their default system is inherently more malware-resistant than Windows, when either way you're trusting anything you run in user space with almost everything important.
Some* Linux users
> Honest question: do you segment your activities on your computer on different users?
Yes.
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.
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.
I don't think Microsoft auditing of code it signs. Wasn't Crowdstrike signed by Microsoft?
It was. All Windows kernel drivers are.
Microsoft doesn't do any auditing besides "is this the most obvious malware?"
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.
- … 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
This is probably the video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-EbjGSRyKA&pp=ygUZYmFzaWNhb...
BasicallyHomeless has made it his life mission to eradicate cheating in video games.
Is cyborg doping even cheating? At least at this stage it's still high effort and DIY. That almost makes it legitimate to me
many sport communities call doping cheating
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)
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.
If the server sends your client "you hear footsteps from this location" then you know where they are.
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
And since the game has access to the anticheat running in the kernel, every Valorant bug is a potential root level kernel exploit.
And it gets circumvented anyway.
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.
Having one determined cheater ist worth not having 1000 cheaters because they fear getting banned.
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.
The video showing one person cheating does not mean there aren't a 1000 others doing the same
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.
> 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.
As much as I reminisce about the days of private servers for Quake/2/3, UT99, CS1.6, etc., saying this is really ignorant of how modern gaming and matchmaking works. Some games would simply not be possible without public matchmaking; I don't care how much of a social butterfly you are, you are not going to get 99 friends to get a PUBG match going. Even getting 11 other people to run a game of Overwatch or CS would be a pain. Other games need public matchmaking to have a fair ranking system. You go onto say ranking is "weaponised" but, ranking is a feature, and a lot of people like that feature.
> 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.
The demand for anticheat, and matchmaking/ranking systems, are entirely player-driven, not publisher-driven. If developers and publishers could get away with only implementing player-managed servers and letting players deal with cheaters, they would! It's a lot less work for them.
As a sibling comment mentioned, even in the days of private servers you ended up with community-developed tools like Punkbuster. I remember needing to install some anti-cheat crap when I signed up for Brood War's private ICCUP ladder.
Large-player count community server driven games actually have a pretty big advantage compared to smaller player count ones: it makes it easier to have somebody with the permission to ban cheaters online at approximately all times.
Squad has 100 player games, and despite its anticheat having well-known bypasses, I don't see a lot of hacked client cheating. Why? Because I play on servers that consistently have a couple people online during the hours I play that ban anybody who cheats.
Community servers have a lot more moderators than the game devs could possibly afford, because they can build trust with volunteers.
> this is really ignorant of how modern gaming and matchmaking works.
If you listen to the people complaining about cheating... it doesn't.
> I don't care how much of a social butterfly you are, you are not going to get 99 friends to get a PUBG match going.
True, but my county is able to get more than that number of people into a cricket league. You don't need to personally know everyone, just be confident that there is a system of trust in place that would weed out any rotters. Is such a system going to be perfect? No, but neither are any of the top-down approaches attempted in videogames. At least this one doesn't require me to install an umpire in my home at all times.
> As a sibling comment mentioned, even in the days of private servers you ended up with community-developed tools like Punkbuster.
The difference is that you could have played the game without doing that. If you didn't trust the people on that server, how likely would you be to install those tools?
> True, but my county is able to get more than that number of people into a cricket league. You don't need to personally know everyone, just be confident that there is a system of trust in place that would weed out any rotters. Is such a system be perfect? No, but neither are any of the top-down approaches attempted in videogames.
I played against the EVO 2025 world champion Street Fighter 6 player in ranked matchmaking last week. When's the last time your county cricket team played against anyone who's won the Cricket World Cup?
We're fundamentally talking about different activities here. Lamar Jackson doesn't get to choose who he plays against in the NFL; if he wants to win the Super Bowl he has to play against Joe Burrow. If Joe Burrow cheats by deflating some footballs, there has to be a system in place which catches him and doles out appropriate punishment. Your "solution" is essentially telling Lamar to not worry about it and just play flag football with his friends instead.
I realize this type of activity isn't for everyone, and there's something to be said about too many games becoming overly competitive, but your proposed solution doesn't really address the problem.
> We're fundamentally talking about different activities here.
It seems so, and I think your example underlines this:
> Lamar Jackson doesn't get to choose who he plays against in the NFL; if he wants to win the Super Bowl he has to play against Joe Burrow. If Joe Burrow cheats by deflating some footballs, there has to be a system in place which catches him and doles out appropriate punishment.
I don't know who those people are, but I'll assume that this is a reasonable pairing of NFL players. Are you saying that there is no system in place to catch cheating in the NFL? Because I'm pretty sure that there is - it is just made out of people, rather than software.
Software anti-cheat seeks to stop everyone cheating everywhere, and this is clearly impossible. Using current anti-cheat methods in IRL sports, then in a game with as many involved participants as NFL a cheater might get away with it for a bit, but I'm sure if it turned out if the Steelberg Bunglers were deflating their balls every game, then this would be a massive scandal that makes national television. They would probably have to be audited (install anti-cheat) for a season or two before people would trust them to play a clean game for a while.
Move to console or an arcade or something, but away from general purpose personal computers, if you want that level of assurance from the system.
Please. They'll take our collective computing freedom if we don't keep these separate.
This. Back in the day, when you played an FPS on a private server, you'd also be able to observer other players when you died so cheating was discovered pretty quickly. When we had ranked clan matches there'd also be 3rd party observers both for fun (ranked matches were a bit event) and to look for signs of cheating.
> I don't care how much of a social butterfly you are, you are not going to get 99 friends to get a PUBG match going.
Good bot AI is the solution. Playing with 99 bots that you can be sure aren't cheating, is better than playing with 99 people you don't know who might be cheating.
Playing with bots takes away the human element though
My naive take is that technical solutions are possible, but critically they can’t be fully automated. The most effective anti-cheat solution possible probably looks something like a full-time in-house team comprised of seasoned ITSEC, data nerds, a couple of ML people, and a few devs. A team like that could probably pick out and boot cheaters with a very low rate of false positives given adequate data to crunch, and they’d only get better over time as they build a roster of patterns and behaviors to match against.
The problem is that this costs more than game companies are willing to spend, even when they’re raking in cash hand over fist. As long as the problem isn’t so bad that it’s making players quit, it’s cheaper to employ more automated, less effective strategies. The end goal isn’t player happiness, it’s higher profit margins.
I work on one of the games mentioned in this article and you're underestimating cheaters and cheat developers. We're doing this already and we're one of the smaller studios, so the larger studios are for sure doing it on a larger scale. Cheaters are still managing.
Love the 'why don't devs just do x, its so simple' like all other devs are some monkeys just banging their keyboard.
To be fair, I did couch my post right in the first sentence. I wasn’t faulting other devs with it though, not keeping an anti-cheat team or if one exists, not keeping it flush with top notch talent and resources would be the fault of management and the suits at the top, not that of ICs in the trenches like devs.
Always wondered if some distribute fake cheats that snitch or worse. That'd put the cheaters on defense instead of just offense. Yeah people can make their own, but most aren't.
Sadly I would imagine that this would give the legal department nightmares.
It would have to be vigilantes, not the game studio
I think this is the most reasonable take I've seen here. As my sibling comment mentions, people are already doing this. I think that - if anything - my point is that this is being done, but separately to the social element. You could get a hundred PhDs to look at the data and identify a cheater, but what you really want to avoid is someone that 9/10 people don't want to play with... and only the players can really tell you who that is. Data from the PhDs would help, though!
I've not really thought about it so deeply until right exactly now (thanks, all!), but I think doing so might have led me to a very unpopular opinion - I might be prepared to say that this problem can't be solved in an anonymous environment. Unless you have a reputation to ruin (or, say, an xbox account to lose), then being outed as a cheater costs you nothing. Again, this is incompatible with a lot of current multiplayer modes - and most of what I love about PC gaming - but, ultimately, I'd rather be judged by my peers than a rootkit.
I agree with you the issue is scale, but the scale when it worked was when gaming was niche. You can't put that back into the bottle.
The history of plenty of anticheats start with community servers, not matchmaking. Even Team Fortress Classic had enough of a cheating issue that community members developed Punkbuster, which went on to get integrated into Quake 3 Arena. A lot of 3rd party anticheats were developed in that era for community servers. BattlEye for BattleField games. EasyAntiCheat for Counter-Strike. I even remember Starcraft Brood War's 3rd party ICCUP server with 'antihack'.
You still see this today with additional anticheats on community server solutions. GTA V's modded FiveM servers had anticheats before it was added to the official game. CS2 Face-IT and ESEA servers have additional anticheats as people do not think VAC is effective enough.
There are quite a few games that are fun because they throw dozens of players into the same event. I don't have over 100 friends to play with, let alone over 100 friends I trust not to cheat.
For some games the small group approach works, but even a game as simple as Counter Strike requires at least a dozen players to make the most of.
That said, there are perverse incentives in many of the games hit worst by cheaters. Games that invent more and more prestigious rewards and titles for accounts that do well in hopes of them spending more money on microtransactions, or the microtransaction hell-holes like GTA Online that exist as a vessel to take your money more than to be of any fun. Adding upgrades and other desired items behind a gambling mechanic makes the whole ordeal extra shitty, praying on the psychological weaknesses of the unfortunate souls to get a digital gambling addiction so they can be sucked dry by billion dollar companies.
I've personally never run into anticheat issues because I find most of the games that require anticheat for online play just aren't worth the time and effort to play online in.
But still, the old SW Battlefront II wouldn't be fun without the massive online matches, and those require some form of anticheat to stay fun.
Making sure you can get enough people together for a game is one thing; making sure you can get enough people together for a game that you know aren't cheating is even harder. Most "friends" these days are online-only acquaintances that you simply can't know well enough to know if they're cheating or not. In the heat of the moment while playing a game it's tough to tell if someone's cheating or just good at the game. The toxicity of people being accused of cheating and defending themselves will quickly split apart any acquaintance group.
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.)
> For example, as you said, you can have games with randoms without an automatic ranking of all players
Good skill matching is one of the most important advancement in gaming over the last few decades. Being able to consistently play against people who are fair competition for you makes the games so much more fun, especially if you are much better or much worse than the average player. In the old days, you could alternate between opponents that were no challenge at all and opponents you would have no chance against; both types of games get old really fast.
In some ways, good skill matching can alleviate the harm cheaters do; if the cheating makes them way better than everyone else, then good matchmaking should start to match them up only against other cheaters. In many ways, this is the ideal scenario - cheaters play against each other, and everyone else plays against people who are close in skill level.
I think you might have missed my parenthetical! :)
Most skill ranking systems actually don’t show the rating they use for matchmaking. There is usually a separate level that is shown rather than what is used for matchmaking.
This is because many people get really upset when their displayed rating doesn’t go up after playing a lot of games, but with a skill level that is the expected result when you finally reach your true skill rating. Players won’t constant progression, so they will show a separate score that keeps going up while they use a hidden true rating for matchmaking.
That still exists in many games with server browsers. The game just goes through the server list to find a populated one with low latency and “official” settings (ie not knife only or modded).
Works basically the same as matchmaking does now, albeit in only matching on server quality and not player skill.
> 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.
This does not stop cheaters whatsoever. Anyone who played during the private server era of FPS in the late 90s/early 00s knows this; wallhacking, modified character models with big pointy spikes indicating player locations, aimbots, etc. ran rampant, even when nothing was on the line.
They could still have this with a campaign/story-mode or even a simple bot-mode.
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.
Playing against bots is to get a feel for the game, see if you like it and get good enough to not embarrass yourself. Then you look into moving onto playing with people. By that time you should have learned how to use the games community building features to find others to play with.
Thanks. Personally, I simply refuse to install games with anti-cheats, be it on Linux or on Windows. This mostly leaves me with FOSS games and small communities. For instance, Zero-K. Zero-K is curiously fine for large team games - you will usually find players to play with anytime - but if you are looking for PvP you have to be there when the right players are usually online. Being there and available for a game can be a way to contribute to a FOSS project too.
In some cases there are numerous public servers, which can mitigate the "player availability" problem.
Also, for these online FOSS games the servers are community-owned and moderated. Cheaters, trolls, inappropriate chats are monitored by someone who is interested in, and generally quite knowledgeable about, the game.
Can you please list some more FOSS games that are "good" in your opinion? would be very appreciated.
I am mainly into Luanti [1], which actually is a game engine for Minecraft-like games but the community is slowly expanding so we are starting to see original games. Public servers run original games as well, which may or may not be technically open source.
In the same graphic style, there's Veloren [2] which is probably the most promising MMORPG-like FOSS game. This isn't Luanti, but a Rust project from scratch (not that I care about the implementation language, though, except when its poor performance becomes a limiting factor). Played some, but voxel graphics without a world fully editable by players makes less sense to me.
I used to play Cube2:Sauerbraten [3], which is an arena shooter. This is an old game, community is slowly shrinking. Was a good casual shooter when I played, but now probably the players that still play are probably accuracy monsters but I never was good getting old doesn't help. Offline vs bot is still fun, and there's a couple of campaigns in the box. Unvanquished [4] is an arena shooter as well with an original concept (played it a little a while ago, should check it out again).
Battle For Wesnoth [5] is top tier as far as turn-based strategy goes.
OOlite [6] is a recreation of the original Elite (Elite:Dangerous is the lastest Opus). Single player game, 600+ mods last time I checked. I was quite into it before moving to Luanti because my interests shifted. OOlite sort of runs at its own pace sometimes, that is the player doesn't have full control over the amount of "action" happening. It is also a difficult game, especially in the early game where it can be unforgiving if not unfair. IIRC, the game comes with a PDF file with some good piece of advice.
I sometimes play some SuperTuxKart [7] single player. Good for casual racing. There's also a football mode which is probably like RocketLeague, but that's not my thing. I used to play StuntRally [8] before the author rebased in on a more recent graphic engine after a long hiatus, which my rig cannot run for some reason. StuntRally has a lot of features - it had online mode before SuperTuxKart did.
0A.D. [9] is and AoE-like with top-tier graphics. Didn't play it a lot because I don't like much games when you mass-kill humans, especially women - call me old school.
In Zero-K [10] it's robots versus robots so it's fine by me. As an RTS, I find it in many ways superior to Starcraft except graphics, partly because it is tuned to handle a massive number of units (no population cap). It is based on the Spring Engine, which features pleasant unit positioning; recently I tried again Warzone2100, but the lack of this feature made it "unplayable" for me. Other games like Zero-K with better graphics are EvolutionRTS and Beyond All Repair, but I didn't play them because my rig can just barely handle ZK already.
[1] https://www.luanti.org/
[2] https://veloren.net/
[3] http://sauerbraten.org/
[4] https://unvanquished.net/category/news/
[5] https://wesnoth.itch.io/battle-for-wesnoth
[6] https://oolite.space/
[7] https://supertuxkart.net
[8] https://stuntrally.tuxfamily.org/
[9] https://play0ad.com/
[10] https://zero-k.info/
Thank you very much. Sauerbraten is really great :) i play that one already.
> 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.
One of the games mentioned in this article is Rust. Playing with only people you trust defeats the point because it's a game full of betrayal. At best you'll be able to get a group together once and then destroy your relationships more than Monopoly would.
I cannot agree. Getting a Quake game up in the early 2000s could take hours worth of sitting in IRC pickup channels, if it happened at all. I don't feel publishers are at fault here. I figure the vast majority of players would pick an instant game with potential cheaters over an hour wait for a 50% chance at a game.
That's because few people played Quake, it got elitist really fast. I had the same issue with it. I had zero issues with CS, though, finding a match was pretty easy. PUGs aren't a thing of the past, PUBG players used to do them for example.
Yeah, or don't play video games that people treat as jobs, cause that's where cheaters go. Csgo was one. Better yet, there are hobbies.
So how am I supposed to play a game of PUBG if I don't have 99 friends who I trust not to cheat who also play it? How is any community going to establish and continuously monitor that their members don't cheat, while also allowing new members to join over time? I don't have a big group of friends who also like playing the same games I play at the same times I want to play, sounds like a total non-starter to me.
Even people you think you trust might cheat.
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.
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.
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.
You are assuming the streaming gamer platforms would tolerate this behavior.
https://safety.twitch.tv/articles/en_US/Knowledge/Community-...
They can cheat off camera and still talk about how everyone on the leaderboard is cheating.
Similar opinion on playing CS on lower rank levels few years ago, felt it's statistically improbable for MG level player to have HS% of 100% on rifle while also top-fragging. Even smurfs would spray situationally hence unlikely hit the head hitbox. I don't know if these players are purposefully put into low ELO so they get cleaned before annoying higher pools.
I wouldn't mind penalising smurfing the same as cheating. Either way it's ruining everyone else's fun.
I do wonder how much we can detect when people play similar to how aimbots behave. Interesting video: https://youtu.be/z772xJRUeYc?feature=shared
No need for a robot to move the mouse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9alJwQG-Wbk
> These people can simply be banned immediately by hardware/steam ID
And how do you actually ensure a good hardware ID that can't be trivially modified?
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".
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?
The guest VM doesn't actually have to be Linux, but I don't see why it couldn't be any old distro.
> 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?
Watching rented movies is something consumers apparently do; I understand it to have mostly been used for that.
Besides that, these aren't area-heavy features; it's cheaper to share the core design and just have the feature available anyways than to design it out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
If the matchmaking is working properly, you should be winning around half of your matches once your ranking stabilizes, right? This doesn’t feel very good, but I don’t see any alternative.
I think that Team Fortress is pretty good in this regard... at least for some CTF maps and configurations... (I'm mostly recalling the original quake mod)... there were some maps that you had to have a scout/spy to be able to get past a strategically positioned automatic gun, and even then an HW guy by the flag was a pretty good secondary that was hard to get through.
Of course, I still remember seeing cheaters back then, in that game... usually quickly kicked off the server you were playing on.
> 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.
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-...
>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.
Good point, there's also sound. I suppose ultimately only server side rendering could solve that... although that is a thing now.
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-transi...
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.
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).
> 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?
> 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.
The distinction doesn't really matter. The claim wasn't that the ransomware authors exploited deficiencies in the anticheat design, just that the anticheat was used to install the ransomware, which it was.
> 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.
Software with that level of access having a supply chain compromise is not an argument in its defense.
See that's the thing, I'm not making an "argument in its defense", I'm just telling the truth (the whole truth). It might not be an important distinction to you, but it might be an important distinction to the next person, and glossing over points like this does everyone a disservice.
Fair. Then thank you for telling the full story (which makes them look even worse).
To you ;)
I just gave up and only console game. On the plus side I can buy cheaper computers now.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
IME these systems can be quite fragile in practice. All it takes is one pre-signature exploit (like U-boot parsing ext4 and devicetree before verifying signature) and your whole chain becomes useless.
And while the kernel is quite secure against hacks from userspace, the hardware interfaces are generally more trusted. This is not a problem on smartphones or embedded devices where you can obfuscate everything on a small SoC but the whole PC/x86_64 platform is much more flexible and open. I doubt there is a way to get reliable attestation on current desktop systems (many of which are assembled from independent parts) unless you get complete buy-in from all the manufacturers.
Finally, with AI systems recently increasing in power, perhaps soon the nuclear option of camera + CV + keyboard/mouse will become practical.
It rather depends on if you have a specific hardware target.
It's the sort of thing I think Valve will do with the Steam Deck eventually.
> All it takes is one pre-signature exploit
I'm pretty sure GRUB is infamous now for being a source of secure boot bypasses.
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.
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).
Then cheaters will be able to just patch the game startup code so it skips the TPM check. If the game executable were encrypted to the TPM somehow, that might work then though.
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?
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-ba...
Of course the cheat developers don't sit idle, so this is far from over.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those are basically just scripts on inputs, pretty much nothing like aimbot or wallhacks
Capture card your video output to a Raspberry Pi, connect the Pi to a XIM over USB and have it pretend to be a keyboard and mouse, and you have an aimbot. I would guess XIMs put 0 effort into ensuring it’s a real KBM and not a dummy device.
True that wallhacks aren’t possible via peripherals, though. You might be able to get some level of info from the audio output and map knowledge, but nowhere near the same as true ESP.
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).
>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.
Generally yes, although some cheats like aim assistance would work fine on online streamed games, since they can scan your screen and adjust your mouse input to aim.
To be fair kernel anticheat can't block this completely either, it can be run on external hardware that uses a capture card to analyze your video feed and alter your mouse inputs to the computer. Generally undetectable unless the game is able to identify unnatural mouse movements.
>it can be run on external hardware that uses a capture card to analyze your video feed and alter your mouse inputs to the computer.
I think at some point defeating this becomes impossible. This sort of cheating isn't much different conceptually from just having someone who's really good at the game play for you.
Valve have been trying by training a neural net that watches every competitive cs:go match played to detect aim bots since 2017 with training data sourced from players labelling demos as cheats or no cheats, but I don't think they've hit a big breakthrough yet
Cloud gaming is flatly non-workable for any kind of game where latency matters. This also covers most of the market for games where anti-cheats matter a lot.
> Cloud gaming is flatly non-workable for any kind of game where latency matters.
Not if only the rendering is done on the client. Look at rocket league.
Edit: of course, it is still possible to cheat in rocket league, but because all physics state is server authoritative at best a perfectly coded cheat could play like a perfect human, not supernatural.
I'm not familiar with Rocket League but server authoritative netcode is not comparable to cloud gaming. All games should be as server authoritative as possible to prevent cheating from the start. The problem is the client may have more state in memory than what you can see rendered on screen (players behind walls). Running the game on the cloud makes all of that inaccessible to cheats.
How is that a problem if everyone is using it?
People have varying distance to the server, and regardless, it would still feel really crappy for everyone.
People have varying equipment at home anyway, the only way to make it fair is to force people to come to the same room amd play on exact same equipment, a bit like keirin racers in Japan.
Lag is the biggest issue... even a local wifi connection vs wired can make a massive difference in terms of what's acceptable lag.
Of course, to TFA's point on network code... a lot of the issues in question could come down to checking for movements that exceed human... moving faster than the speed in game, or even twitch aiming movements faster than a mouse, or a consistent level of X accuracy in shooting over time. On the last part, I'm not sure if there might be some way to mask a user's hit zone, rendering and such so that an aim-bot thinks the foot is center-mass, etc. Or if it could be randomly shifted in a test scenario.
Or consoles. PS5 is pretty good for a cheat free environment
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...
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!
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.
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.
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
> Vanguard did end up banning those people eventually, since it can see what devices you have plugged in.
Only because the makers of those DMA cards do a bad job hiding themselves. They either use vague, recognisable names, or don't act like the devices they're spoofing.
The moment a cheat developer manages to reprogram an actual SSD (especially a common model), hardware detection like that becomes near impossible.
Riot just shipped a new kind of DMA protection, using IOMMU, and they tout that that cheating method is now 6 feet deep.
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"
> 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.
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.
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.
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 (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
This is an extreme example
I agree, it is extreme and crude, today.
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.
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.
I will map /dev/kmem and disable it for you; do not worry.
-- Your friendly neighborhood rootkit developer
I did cover the risks of giving root to these trash programs.
CONFIG_DEVKMEM=n
Hmm... Mount efivarfs, change boot configuration to use a backdoored initramfs. Then fake a kernel panic screen and reboot :)
> 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.
… well, technically speaking, most of it is open source. However, some parts regarding Apple Pay, FileVault, FairPlay DRM, any iOS compatibility, it’s excised.
Right, but you can splice your recompiled version back into the original binary, complete with proprietary components. I've done this before, maybe I should write up the process.
With SIP enabled?
For my particular use case I disabled SIP and everything was fine, but workarounds should be possible.
Please do!
Is that really true?
How would one get the modified XNU past the verified-boot process? Turn off verified boot?
The overall process is documented here: https://kernelshaman.blogspot.com/2021/02/building-xnu-for-m...
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.
So intercept whatever mechanism it's using to detect SIP enabled status...?
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.
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.
You do have to disable it, but you can patch the kernel to lie to userland about SIP status.
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?
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.
tinfoil hat time: three letters use anticheat rootkits to pivot into systems and are sock puppeting anti-anti-cheat.
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.
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.
Everyone keeps saying kernel-level anti-cheat doesn't stop cheating and that's true. But does it at least significantly reduce cheating?
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.
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.
> The issue of anti-cheat on Linux
Is the memory of this kernel module protected from access from another kernel module ?
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
And they don't just remove those freedoms regarding the game, but for the entire system.
> Which obviously causes all kinds of issues, and violates both freedoms 0 and 1 https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
They do not, as long as you can disable the anti-cheat and reboot.
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.
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.
The userland software, sure. But all kernel modules and drivers need to obey my freedoms for me to be able to ever trust the system again.
I'd end up in court if I gave a random game developer root permissions on the same system that I use for client projects. But installing a kernel module is fine?
If the valorant module wanted, it could intercept anything from that point on. It could intercept me trying to uninstall it, and pretend it had been removed, while just hiding itself. It could intercept any debugging I'd be trying to do, and feed me false data.
That's why I don't use proprietary kernel modules, and never run proprietary code with root permissions.
And I shouldn't have to. Games don't need client side anticheat.
Why do even many single player games now ship with anti-cheat? Because they want to protect their lootboxes and microtransactions.
And even competitive games don't need client side anti-cheat. Most games are perfectly fine with a well-written server-side anticheat, and the ones that don't work fine if you host a private server with people you know.
No other part of IT would ever trust the client. Giving the client information they shouldn't have is an instant CVE, and so is relying on client-side validation.
But client-side anticheat is cheaper, and matchmaking increases engagement, so alternatives are dismissed.
I don't want to play with randoms. Even in mmorpgs I prefer finding a group via the zone chat, which also encourages finding a guild and making friendships, over playing with randoms. Especially if the matchmaking doesn't even take party roles into account.
So why should I break my clients' trust to give control of my system to someone I don't know to install software I don't want just so I can play a game with matchmaking just because the developer didn't want to pay for proper server-side anticheat?
Personally, I only ever play FOSS games, they are more freedom and privacy respecting. Is that an option for you?
"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.
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
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/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
What options do gamers have?
1. No games
2. Inscrutable rootkit
3. Piracy
4. Attestation, i.e. partial Tivoization
Of these, #4 seems least awful and maximally user freedom preserving. Unlike regular Tivoization, also, we're not talking about locking down the whole machine. No need. You basically just need to attest the kernel and some binary signing infrastructure. You can run custom builds of whatever else you want otherwise.
I mean, or you can run a trusted VM, as some others have suggested. Is that really any worse?
Another option is to use servers that do not require the anti-cheating, or to play vs others who do not require the anti-cheating, or to use a local network with dedicated computers for this purpose, or games that do not have these features, or only play vs other trusted players within a group that you trust.
Just invite you friends at home and play together already.
my friends live in the computer
Here is your issue, get the f out of here.
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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.
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.
haven't seen this done properly in a FPS yet.
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