I would love to see a modern competitive game with optional anticheat that, when enabled, allows you to queue for a separate matchmaking pool that is exclusive to other anticheat users. For players in the no-anticheat pool, there could be "community moderation" that anti-anticheat players advocate for.
It'd be really interesting to see what would happen - for instance, what fraction of players would pick each pool during the first few weeks after launch, and then how many of them would switch after? What about players who joined a few months or a year after launch?
Unfortunately, pretty much the only company that could make this work is Valve, because they're the only one who actually cares for players and is big enough that they could gather meaningful data. And I don't think that even Valve will see enough value in this to dedicate the substantial resources it'd take to try to implement.
Cyph0n 5 hours ago [-]
> I would love to see a modern competitive game with optional anticheat that, when enabled, allows you to queue for a separate matchmaking pool that is exclusive to other anticheat users. For players in the no-anticheat pool, there could be "community moderation" that anti-anticheat players advocate for.
This is roughly what Valve does for CS2. But, as far as I understand, it's not very effective and unfortunately still results in higher cheating rates than e.g. Valorant.
throw10920 5 hours ago [-]
Huh. When you say that "it's not very effective" do you mean the segmentation between the pools, or the actual anticheat isn't very good? (I'm assuming the latter - I've heard that VAC is pretty bad as far as anticheat goes)
Cyph0n 5 hours ago [-]
Oh sorry - I misread your suggestion! I thought you were talking about separate matchmaking logic for known cheaters, but you're asking about opt-in matchmaking for those willing to use invasive anticheat.
The example still kind of applies. In the CS world, serious players use Faceit for matchmaking, which requires you to install a kernel-level anticheat. This is basically what you're suggesting, but operated by a 3rd party.
throw10920 3 hours ago [-]
Hmm, I guess that since VAC is not a kernel-level anticheat, the comparison between it and Faceit for CS is pretty close to my idea. Thanks for pointing that out.
z0mghii 5 hours ago [-]
Community alternative (faceit) requires kernel level access. The actual anticheat matchmaking is essentially unplayable
throw10920 4 hours ago [-]
Wait, so the "community alternative" is also kernel-level anticheat? I think that's different from what I'm proposing - I'm suggesting a comparison between an anticheat and no anticheat (with community policing of lobbies and handing out of penalties).
z0mghii 3 hours ago [-]
Why would a player knowingly choose to play on matchmaking that is advertising no anti-cheat?
It was terrible as it required the community to conclude beyond reasonable doubt the suspect was cheating, and cheats today are sophisticated enough to make that conclusion very difficult to make
throw10920 3 hours ago [-]
> Why would a player knowingly choose to play on matchmaking that is advertising no anti-cheat?
I guess I didn't exactly make that clear...
A few of the arguments advanced by the "anti-anticheat" crowd that inevitably pops up in these threads are "anticheat is ineffective so there's no point to using it" and "anticheat is immoral because players aren't given a choice to use it or not and most of them would choose to not use it".
I don't believe that either of these are true (and given the choice I would almost never pick the no-anticheat queue), but there's not a lot of good high-quality data to back that up. Hence, the proposal for a dual-queue system to try to gather that data.
Putting in the community review of the no-anticheat pool is just to head off the inevitable goalpost-moving of "well of course no system would be worse than a crappy system (anticheat), you need to compare the best available alternative (community moderation)".
charcircuit 4 hours ago [-]
VAC is essentially no anticheat with how easily it is bypassed.
lemontreefive 29 minutes ago [-]
You mean PlaySafe ID?
ambitious_rest 21 minutes ago [-]
thats basically playsafe id
chedca21 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
coppsilgold 2 hours ago [-]
There is a solution to cheating, but it's not clear how hard it would be to implement.
Cheaters are by definition anomalies, they operate with information regular players do not have. And when they use aimbots they have skills other players don't have.
If you log every single action a player takes server-side and apply machine learning methods it should be possible to identify these anomalies. Anomaly detection is a subfield of machine learning.
It will ultimately prove to be the solution, because only the most clever of cheaters will be able to blend in while still looking like great players. And only the most competently made aimbots will be able to appear like great player skills. In either of those cases the cheating isn't a problem because the victims themselves will never be sure.
There is also another method that the server can employ: Players can be actively probed with game world entities designed for them to react to only if they have cheats. Every such event would add probability weight onto the cheaters. Ultimately, the game world isn't delivered to the client in full so if done well the cheats will not be able to filter. For example: as a potential cheater enters entity broadcast range of a fake entity camping in an invisible corner that only appears to them, their reaction to it is evaluated (mouse movements, strategy shift, etc). Then when it disappears another evaluation can take place (cheats would likely offer mitigations for this part). Over time, cheaters will stand out from the noise, most will likely out themselves very quickly.
pibaker 19 minutes ago [-]
> Cheaters are by definition anomalies
So are very good players, very bad players, players with weird hardware issues, players who just got one in a million lucky…
When you have enough randomly distributed variables, by the law of big numbers some of them will be anomalous by pure chance. You can't just look at any statistical anomaly and declare it must mean something without investigating further.
In science, looking at a huge number of variables and trying to find one or two statistically significant variables so you can publish a paper is called p hacking. This is why there are so many dubious and often even contradictory "health condition linked to X" articles.
coppsilgold 16 minutes ago [-]
> So are very good players, very bad players, players with weird hardware issues, players who just got one in a million lucky…
They will all cluster in very different latent spaces.
You don't automatically ban anomalies, you classify them. Once you have the data and a set of known cheaters you ask the model who else looks like the known cheaters.
Online games are in a position to collect a lot of data and to also actively probe players for more specific data such as their reactions to stimuli only cheaters should see.
bob1029 2 hours ago [-]
I've been advocating for a statistical honeypot model for a while now. This is a much more robust anti cheat measure than even streaming/LAN gaming provides. If someone figures out a way to obtain access to information they shouldn't have on a regular basis, they will be eventually be found with these techniques. It doesn't matter the exact mechanism of cheating. This even catches the "undetectable" screen scraping mouse robot AI wizard stuff. Any amount of signal integrated over enough time can provide damning evidence.
> With that goal in mind, we released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using. This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits. Each of the accounts banned today read from this "secret" area in the client, giving us extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.
While I’m not really a gamer, I do think the conundrum of online games cheating is an interesting technical problem because I honestly can’t think of a “good” solution. The general simplistic answer from those who never had to design such a game or a system of “do everything on the server” is laughably bad.
bee_rider 5 hours ago [-]
Preventing cheating is hopeless.
Anyway, this isn’t the Olympics, a professional sport, or Chess. It’s more like pickup league. Preserving competitive purity should be a non-goal. Rather, aim for fun matches. Matchmaking usually tries to find similar skill level opponents anyway, so let cheaters cheat their way out of the wider population and they’ll stop being a problem.
Or, let players watch their killcams and tag their deaths. Camper, aimbot, etc etc. Then (for players that have a good sample size of matches) cluster players to use the same tactics together.
Treating games like serious business has sucked all the fun out of it.
eddythompson80 5 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately that has been proven to not work.
Matching based on skill works only as long as you have an abundance of players you can do that based on. When you have to account for geography, time of day, momentary availability, and skill level, you realize that you have fractured certain players far too much that it’s not fun for them anymore. Keep in mint that “cheaters” are also looking for matches that would maximize their cheats. Maybe it’s 8PM Pacific Time with tons of players there, but it’s 3 AM somewhere else with much limited number of players. Spoof your ping and location to be there and have fun sniping every player in the map. Sign up for new accounts on every play, who cares. Your fun as a cheater is to watch others lose their shit. You’re not building a character with history and reputation. You are heat sniping others while they are not realizing it. It may sound limited in scope and not worth the effort for you, but it’s millions of people out there tht ruin the game for everyone.
Almost every game I know of lets players “watch their kill cam”, and cheaters have adapted. The snipped people have a bias to vote the sniper was cheating, and the snipers have a bias to vote otherwise. Lean one way or the other, and it’s another post on /r/gaming of how your game sucks.
chrisfosterelli 5 hours ago [-]
Well it is a professional sport -- there's tournaments worth tens of millions of dollars. But honestly it is probably easier to catch cheaters in that environment. The real issue is that cheaters suck the fun out of the game, and matchmaking doesn't fix this because cheaters just cheat the matchmaking (smurf accounts, etc) until they're stomping regular players again. I don't think throwing our hands up and letting the cheaters go on is a real solution.
drdaeman 9 minutes ago [-]
> The real issue is that cheaters suck the fun out of the game
Unpopular opinion: cheaters don’t, griefers do.
“Cheater” is a pejorative for someone who sidesteps the rules and uses technology instead of, uh, pardon a potentially word choice, innate skills. They don’t inherently want to see others suffer as they stomp - it’s a matchmaking bug they’re put where they don’t belong. They just want to do things they cannot do on their own, but what are technically possible. A more positive term for that is a “hacker”.
Griefers are a different breed, they don’t just enjoy own success but get entertained by others’ suffering. Not a cheating issue TBH (cheats merely enable more opportunities), more like “don’t match us anymore, we don’t share the same ideas of fun” thing. “Black hat” is close enough term I guess.
YMMV, but if someone performs adequately for my skill levels (that is, they also don’t play well) then they don’t deprive me of any fun irrespective of how they’re playing.
bee_rider 4 hours ago [-]
Smurf accounts are a real problem, but they are a real problem whether the person stomping beginners is using cheats or is just experienced. The target should be preventing smurfing in the first place.
chrisfosterelli 4 hours ago [-]
That's a good point.
YetAnotherNick 4 hours ago [-]
> Anyway, this isn’t the Olympics, a professional sport, or Chess.
Yes, its prize pool is order of magnitude higher than either of Olympics sports or Chess.
bee_rider 4 hours ago [-]
I’m sure there’s a game out there that has a prize pool for matchmaking mode, because any silly thing has happened somewhere, but I’d expect that sort of thing to mostly be handled in proper tournaments.
tapoxi 3 hours ago [-]
It's not so much tournaments but viewership. People watch others play on Twitch, that gets you money directly as well as sponsorships. This incentives people to cheat so they're good on stream.
Jensson 2 hours ago [-]
It is a lot harder to cheat on a live stream though.
Morromist 5 hours ago [-]
The only solution that seems to work well that I've seen is having very active and good server admins who watch the gameplay and permaban cheaters. Requires a lot of man hours and good UI and info for them to look at, as well as (ideally) the ability to see replays.
That solution only works on servers hosted by players - I've never seen huge game companies that run their own servers (like GTA) have dedicated server admins. I guess they think they can just code cheaters out of their games, but they never can.
hrmtst93837 2 hours ago [-]
Most people ignore that "do everything on the server" kills any game that needs fast interactions or decent local prediction, latency goes through the roof and you might as well play chess by email. There isn't a clean answer.
Kernel anti-cheat isn't an elegant solution either. It's another landmine, security holes, false positives, broken dev tools, and custody battles with Windows updates while pushing more logic server-side still means weeks of netcode tuning and a cascade of race conditions every time player ping spikes, so the idea that this folds to "better code disipline" is fantasy.
rangestransform 1 hours ago [-]
Not all the processing needs to be done online, it can be done completely async offline on game logs
tonyhart7 1 hours ago [-]
sorry but kernel anti cheat is actually good
I play fps competitively and valorant is by far the most least cheater fps game on the market
bigstrat2003 1 hours ago [-]
It may be effective, but it's an unacceptable security risk imo. No amount of effectiveness can justify installing a literal rootkit to play the game.
tonyhart7 1 hours ago [-]
its called anti cheat for a reason (not anti spyware)
nothing perfect in software world and this is the best tool for its job
PowerElectronix 1 hours ago [-]
Except for the risk of the game being compromised and everything in your computer along with it.
tonyhart7 60 minutes ago [-]
its like saying game piracy is bad because you can get hack in your pc
if your pc is so important then maybe don't install these particular software
its all about trade off
karmakaze 6 hours ago [-]
Do what Netflix did and run servers at ISPs (or at their providers or Cloudflare points).
It's kind of weird that we still don't have distributed computing infrastructure. Maybe that will be another thing where agents can run near the data their crunching on generic compute nodes.
raincole 5 hours ago [-]
To quote the parent comment:
> The general simplistic answer from those who never had to design such a game or a system of “do everything on the server” is laughably bad.
Retr0id 6 hours ago [-]
What does that have to do with solving the problem?
eddythompson80 5 hours ago [-]
Sorry to day this, but I don’t think you understand how any of this works. Whenever someone’s proposed “edge computing” as a way to solve trust problems, I know they are just stringing together fancy sounding words they don’t understand.
What “Netflix did” was having dead-simple static file serving appliance for ISPs to host with their Netflix auth on top. In their early days, Netflix had one of the simplest “auth” stories because they didn’t care.
5 hours ago [-]
karmakaze 5 hours ago [-]
There's different levels of cheating. We can avoid the worst cases by not putting the game state/Netcode in the users computer which basically makes it like an X Server.
It would add some latency but could be opt-in for those that care enough for all players in a match to take the hit.
Thaxll 5 hours ago [-]
All the games that use kernel anti cheat have the simulation running on the server.
You can't make a competitive fps game with a dumb terminal, it can't work because the latency is too high so that's why you have to run local predictive simulation.
You don't want to wait the server to ack your inputs.
hakkoru 6 hours ago [-]
I think from a purely technical viewpoint, cheaters will always have the advantage since they control the machine the game and anti-cheat is running on. Anti-cheat just has to keep the barrier high enough so regular players don't think the game is infested with cheaters.
cortesoft 5 hours ago [-]
I have never worked on AAA games, but I have developed software for 35 years and play many competitive online games regularly.
I have always wondered why more companies don't do trust based anti cheat management. Many cheats are obvious from anyone in the game, you see people jumping around like crazy, or a character will be able to shoot through walls, or something else that impossible for a non-cheater to do.
Each opponent in the game is getting the information from the cheating player's game that has it doing something impossible. I know it isn't as simple as having the game report another player automatically, because cheaters could report legitimate players... but what if each game reported cheaters, and then you wait for a pattern... if the same player is reported in every game, including against brand new players, then we would know the were a cheater.
Unless cheaters got to be a large percentage of the player population, they shouldn't be able to rig it.
dxuh 1 hours ago [-]
Counter-Strike has been doing this for years. It's called "Overwatch" (even before Blizzards Overwatch came out). And believe it or not it failed to reliably catch actual cheaters AND got non-cheaters in trouble (both repeatedly). A very good player is indistinguishable from a cheater with a good cheat. Sometimes people just get super lucky for a few rounds and you might get judged based on that.
magicalhippo 55 minutes ago [-]
> A very good player is indistinguishable from a cheater with a good cheat.
I played COD4 a lot, though not competitively. I used to say that I had a bad day if I didn't get called a cheater once.
I didn't cheat, never have, but some people are just not aware of where the ceiling is.
The cheaters that annoyed us back then were laughably obvious. They'd just hold the button with a machine gun and get headshots after headshots, or something blatant like that.
max-m 3 hours ago [-]
A couple of years ago the bot situation in casual Team Fortress 2 was so bad that it wasn't uncommon to land in a game where the majority of at least one of the teams was a group of cooperating bots. In those matches you have the possibility to start a kick-vote on your team mates, and those bots would immediately vote “no” if you tried to vote on any of them and because they were the majority of the team these votes always failed. And if these batch were in your enemy team all you could do was to ask the remaining, hopefully real, players on the enemy team to try to kick them.
It was especially annoying when you tried to play certain game modes these bots weren't programmed to handle, they had no idea of the objective and the match would stall indefinitely, forcing you to queue for a different match.
And if I remember correctly these bots were pretty much headshotting everything they got in sight. Something the server can easily detect.
But VAC for example acts intentionally slow, so cheaters don't get immediate feedback.
Out of curiosity I did a quick internet search and a couple of months ago a new wave of bots has emerged. Those bots also join as majority group but never fully join the game, they simply take up slots in a team, preventing others from joining. Makes you wonder why the server isn't timing them out.
orbital-decay 3 hours ago [-]
Less skilled players can't distinguish better players from cheaters, and reports are usually abused and used in bad faith. Even a good-faith report really just means "I don't want to see this player for whatever reason". It's used as a signal of something in most systems but never followed outright in good games because players get a ton of useless reports.
Players in some games with custom servers run webs of trust (or rather distrust, shared banlists). They are typically abused to some degree and good players are banned across multiple servers by admins acting in bad faith or just straight up not caring. This rarely ends well.
I used to run popular servers for PvP sandbox games and big communities, and we used votebans/reports to evict good players from casual servers to anarchy ones, where they could compete, but a mod always had to approve the eviction using a pretty non-trivial process. This system was useless for catching cheaters, we got them in other ways. That's for PvP sandboxes - in e-sports grade games reports are useless for anything.
eddythompson80 6 hours ago [-]
I agree, but that’s precisely the interesting ‘technical’ problem. Like bitcoins “proof of work” in 2011 (it took me few years to comprehend) was an eye opening moment for me. While I do believe that it firmly failed to achieve its lofty goals, the idea of “proof of work” was a really captivating and interring technical idea. Can a video game client have a similar zero-trust proof of their authenticity? I personally can’t think of one. I can’t think of a way to have remote random agents (authenticates or not) to proof they are not cheating in a “game”, and like you, I suspect it’s not really possible. But what does that mean?
I grew up with star trek and star wars wondering what a “I’ll transfer 20 units to you” meant. Bitcoin was an eye opener in the idea of “maybe this is possible” to me. But it shortly became true to me that it’s not the case. There is no way still for random agents to prove they are not malicious. It’s easier in a network within the confines of Bitcoin network. But maybe I’m not smart enough to come up with a more generalized concept. After all, I was one of the people who read the initial bitcoin white paper on HN and didn’t understand it back then and dismissed it.
charcircuit 3 hours ago [-]
You could have replays where all player inputs are signed by the individual players. This replay file could be used as proof to report a cheater. Analysis tools can be developed later to identify what packets are only possible from cheaters. For example you could prove that a player was sending packets that they were flying around.
akersten 6 hours ago [-]
> Anti-cheat just has to keep the barrier high enough so regular players don't think the game is infested with cheaters.
And even that's the (relatively) straightforward part. The hard part is doing this without injuring the kernel enough that the only sensible solution for the security conscious is a separate PC for gaming.
raincole 5 hours ago [-]
The solution is purely cultural. We should collectively think people who cheat online are losers.
(Not being sarcastic.)
piotrkaminski 4 hours ago [-]
By and large we do. Unfortunately, the losers don't care unless you identify them personally. For them, the thrill of cheating and griefing others easily overcomes some generalized cultural zeitgeist.
jack_pp 4 hours ago [-]
Or bad players might get owned by better ones, conclude the other guy was cheating and the only way to compete is for them to cheat as well.
Sort of like nuclear weapons
seanhunter 2 hours ago [-]
This has happened in online chess, with some people admitting to using engines (ie cheating) to "confirm their suspicion that the other guy is cheating".
beeflet 1 hours ago [-]
This is a noble lie, because it's really the non-cheaters who are losers. If the cheaters lost then there would be no problem.
seanhunter 2 hours ago [-]
Remember you're living in a world where people idolize Elon Musk, a person who employed someone to play path of exile and diabolo to boost his account (ie a cheater). Also a lot of people don't care (or claim not to care) whether people see them as losers as long as they wreck other folks day.
I don't know a single person who doesn't think that the PoE thing was super cringe. To the extent that people idolize Elon, it's because they think his accomplishments outweigh him making a massive fool of himself in that instance.
seanhunter 1 hours ago [-]
That's true. OK I was being unfair.
abofh 6 hours ago [-]
I think it's somewhere between halting and turing - given infinite resources it's likely solvable, but lacking that it's just narrowing bounds
theLiminator 5 hours ago [-]
The only good long term solution is ML on replays + moderately up to date client side (non kernel) AC (just good enough to deter cheaters).
charcircuit 4 hours ago [-]
Mac OS with remote attestation has proven strong enough for anticheat on Mac OS without needing kernel anticheat.
EPWN3D 3 hours ago [-]
> Modern kernel anti-cheat systems are, without exaggeration, among the most sophisticated pieces of software running on consumer Windows machines. They operate at the highest privilege level available to software, they intercept kernel callbacks that were designed for legitimate security products, they scan memory structures that most programmers never touch in their entire careers, and they do all of this transparently while a game is running.
Okay, chill. I'm willing to believe that anti-cheat software is "sophisticated", but intercepting system calls doesn't make it so. There is plenty of software that operates at elevated privilege and runs transparently while other software is running, while intentionally being unsophisticated. It's called a kernel subsystem.
compsciphd 3 minutes ago [-]
i've said it before, but is anti-cheat mechanisms needed on consoles? If not, (presumambly due to their locked down nature), what's the problem with having a locked down mode (trusted secure boot path that doesn't allow other programs to run, ala "the xbox mode" that microsoft has started to implement), that is similar to a console.
This seems much more doable today than in the past as machines boot in moments. Switching from secure "xbox mode" to free form PC mode, would be barely a bump.
Now, I see one major difference, heterogenous vs homogenous hardware (and the associated drivers that come with that). In the xbox world, one is dealing with a very specific hardware platform and a single set of drivers. In the PC world (even in a trusted secure boot path), one is dealing with lots of different hardware and drivers that can all have their exploits. If users are more easily able to modify their PCs and set of drivers one, I'd imagine serious cheaters would gravitate to combinations they know they can exploit to break the secure/trusted boot boundary.
I wonder if there are other problems.
quailfarmer 1 hours ago [-]
The real “competitive” game is not players playing against other players, but hackers playing against anti-cheat.
“Billiards is not as good a game as Physics”
>TPM-based measured boot, combined with UEFI Secure Boot, can generate a cryptographically signed attestation ... This is not a complete solution (a sufficiently sophisticated attacker can potentially manipulate attestation)
I was not aware that attackers could potentially manipulate attestation! How could that be done? That would seemingly defeat the point of remote attestation.
Defeating remote attestation will be a key capability in the future. We should be able to fully own our computers without others being able to discriminate against us for it.
metalcrow 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you for that link, that's super interesting! It looks like it's actually an architectural vulnerability in modern fTPMs, and considered out of scope by both Intel and AMD. So that's a reliable way to break attestation on even the most modern systems!
gruez 6 hours ago [-]
The comms between the motherboard and the TPM chip isn't secured, so an attacker can just do a MITM attack and substitute in the correct values.
halayli 6 hours ago [-]
That doesn't sound accurate. The T in TPM stands for trust, the whole standard is about verifying and establishing trust between entities. The standard is designed with the assumption that anyone can bring in their scope and probe the ports. This is one of several reasons why the standard defines endorsement keys(EK).
invokestatic 5 hours ago [-]
Actually, it is completely true. The TPM threat model has historically focused on software-based threats and physical attacks against the TPM chip itself - crucially NOT the communications between the chip and the CPU. In the over 20 year history of discrete TPMs, they are largely completely vulnerable to interposer (MITM) attacks and only within the last few years is it being addressed by vendors. Endorsement keys don’t matter because the TPM still has to trust the PCR commands sent to it by the CPU. An interposer can replace tampered PCR values with trusted values and the TPM would have no idea.
srjek 4 hours ago [-]
It is correct, the measurement command to the TPM is not encrypted. So with MITM you can record the boot measurements, then reset and replay to any step of the boot process. Secrets locked to particular stages of boot are then exposed.
There is guidance on "Active" attacks [1], which is to set up your TPM secrets so they additionally require a signature from a secret stored securely on the CPU. But that only addresses secret storage, and does nothing about the compromised measurements. I also don't know what would be capable of providing the CPU secret for x86 processors besides... an embedded/firmware TPM.
That's fair, although aren't most TPMs nowadays fTPMs? No interceptable communication that way.
Retr0id 6 hours ago [-]
Until they require fTPMs, an attacker can just choose to use a regular TPM.
A more sophisticated attacker could plausibly extract key material from the TPM itself via sidechannels, and sign their own attestations.
Charon77 5 hours ago [-]
I remember there's a PCI device that's meant to be snooping and manipulating RAM directly by using DMA. Pretty much one computer runs the game and one computer runs the cheat. I think kernel anti cheats are just raising the bar while pretty much being too intrusive
int_19h 54 minutes ago [-]
TFA explicitly describes those devices, and how anti-cheat developers are trying to handle this.
But the main point there is that this setup is prohibitively expensive for most cheaters.
Technically yes, but it would produce an untrusted remote attestation signature (quote). This is roughly equivalent to using TLS with a self-signed certificate — it’s not trusted by anyone else. TPMs have a signing key that’s endorsed by the TPM vendor’s CA.
kay_o 6 hours ago [-]
We don't allow games to run in virtual machines and require TPM. Check TPM EK signing up to an approved manufacturer.
It is not "fake", a software TPM is real TPM but not accepted/approved by anticheat due to inability to prove its provenance
(Disclosure: I am not on the team that works on Vanguard, I do not make these decisions, I personally would like to play on my framework laptop)
Yes, a literal privilege escalation as a service "anticheat" driver.
Trusting these companies is insane.
Every video game you install is untrusted proprietary software that assumes you are a potential cheater and criminal. They are pretty much guaranteed to act adversarially to you. Video games should be sandboxed and virtualized to the fullest possible extent so that they can access nothing on the real system and ideally not even be able to touch each other. We really don't need kernel level anticheat complaining about virtualization.
invokestatic 5 hours ago [-]
The privacy points in general are valid, but what irritates me is using this rationale against kernel mode anti cheats specifically.
You do not need kernel access to make spyware that takes screenshots. You do not need a privileged service to read the user’s browser history.
You can do all of this, completely unprivileged on Windows. People always seem to conflate kernel access with privacy which is completely false. It would in fact be much harder to do any of these things from kernel mode.
Grimblewald 5 hours ago [-]
Kernel access is related to privacy though, and its the most well documented abuse of such things. Kernel level access can help obfuscate the fact that it'a happening. However, it is also useful for significantly worse, and given track records, must be assumed to be true. The problem is kernel level AC hasnt even solved the problem, so the entire thing is risky, uneccesary and unfit for purpose making an entierly unneccesary risk to force onto unsuspecting users. The average user does not understand the risks and is not made aware of them either.
There are far better ways to detect cheating, such as calculating statistics on performance and behaviour and simply binning players with those of similar competency. This way, if cheating gives god-like behaviour, you play with other godlike folks. No banning required. Detecting the thing cheating allows is much easier than detecting ways in which people gain that thing, it creates a single point of detection that is hard to avoid and can be done entierly server side, with multiple teirs how mucb server side calculation a given player consumes. Milling around in bronze levels? Why check? If you aren't performing so well that yoh can leave low ranks, perhaps we need cheats as a handicap, unless co sistently performing well out of distribution, at which point you catch smurfing as well.
point is focusing on detecting the thing people care about rather than one of the myriad of ways people may gain that unfair edge, is going to be easier and more robust while asking for less ergregious things of users.
nemothekid 5 hours ago [-]
>This way, if cheating gives god-like behaviour, you play with other godlike folks.
Anti-cheat is not used to "protect" bronze level games. FACEIT uses a kernel level anti cheat, and FACEIT is primarily used by the top 1% of CS2 players.
A lot of the "just do something else" crowd neglects to realize that anticheat is designed to protect the integrity of the game at the highest levels of play. If the methods you described were adequate, the best players wouldn't willingly install FACEIT - they would just stick with VAC which is user-level.
nawgz 5 hours ago [-]
> kernel level AC hasnt even solved the problem
> There are far better ways to detect cheating, such as calculating statistics on performance
Ask any CS player how VAC’s statistical approach compares to Valorant’s Vanguard and you will stop asserting such foolishness
The problem with what you are saying is that cheaters are extremely determined and skilled, and so the cheating itself falls on a spectrum, as do the success of various anticheat approaches. There is absolutely no doubt that cheating still occurs with kernel level anticheats, so you’re right it didn’t “solve” the problem in the strictest sense. But as a skilled player in both games, only one of them is meaningfully playable while trusting your opponents aren’t cheating - it’s well over an order of magnitude in difference of frequency.
matheusmoreira 5 hours ago [-]
There is no need for irritation. I condemn all sorts of anticheating software. As far as I'm concerned, if the player wants to cheat he's just exercising his god given rights as the owner of the machine. The computer is ours, we can damn well edit any of its memory if we really want to. Attempts to stop it from happening are unacceptable affronts to our freedom as users.
Simply put, the game companies want to own our machines and tell us what we can or can't do. That's offensive. The machine is ours and we make the rules.
I single out kernel level anticheats because they are trying to defeat the very mitigations we're putting in place to deal with the exact problems you mentioned. Can't isolate games inside a fancy VFIO setup if you have kernel anticheat taking issue with your hypervisor.
LiamPowell 5 hours ago [-]
> As far as I'm concerned, if the player wants to cheat he's just exercising his god given rights as the owner of the machine.
By this same logic: As far as I'm concerned, if the game developer only wants to allow players running anticheat to use their servers then they're just exercising their god given rights as the owner of the server.
matheusmoreira 4 hours ago [-]
This is just yet another example of the remote attestation nonsense where your computer is only "trusted" if it's corporate owned. If you own your machine, you "tampered" with it and as a result you get banned from everything. You get ostracized from digital society.
My position is this is unfair discrimination that should be punished with the same rigor as literal racism. Video games are the least of our worries here. We have vital services like banks doing this. Should be illegal.
ryeguy 5 hours ago [-]
This take sucks. The anticheat software in this context is for competitive games. No one cares about people cheating in isolation in single player games. The anticheat is to stop 1 guy from ruining it for the 9 others he's playing with online.
You can argue about the methods used for anticheat, but your comment here is trying to defend the right to cheat in online games with other people. Just no.
int_19h 50 minutes ago [-]
PvE shouldn't need it either, and yet games routinely ship with anti-cheat applied to everything (including single player).
I rather suspect that the reason for this is the current gaming economy of unlockable cosmetics that you can either grind for, or pay for. If people can cheat in single player or PvE, they can unlock the cosmetics without paying. And so...
matheusmoreira 4 hours ago [-]
> The anticheat is to stop 1 guy from ruining it for the 9 others he's playing with online.
Don't play with untrusted randoms. Play with people you know and trust. That's the true solution.
whs 3 hours ago [-]
I wish that is an option. Nowadays many non competitives games that you play with friends you trust still use EAC (yet accept non-kernel mode operation on Linux). I suppose other than VAC you can't buy a usermode anticheat middleware now.
jack_pp 4 hours ago [-]
That is not the solution if you want to play competitively of whenever you feel like it.
Kernel level AC is a compromise for sure and it's the gamers job to assess if the game is worth the privacy risk but I'd say it's much more their right to take that risk than the cheaters right to ruin 9 other people's time for their own selfish amusement
matheusmoreira 4 hours ago [-]
Cheating may not be moral but it's better to put up with it than to cede control of our computers to the corporations that want to own it.
If it kills online gaming, then so be it. I accept that sacrifice. The alternative leads to the destruction of everything the word hacker ever stood for.
jack_pp 3 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry but you are fighting a crusade you can not win by definition. If I am free to use my computer for anything I want then I am also free to lock it down to enjoy my favorite game. If I care about my freedom I will have a dedicated machine for this game that I accept I will not have control over.
You are hijacking this thread about VOLUNTARY ceasing of freedom as if the small community even willing to install these is a slippery slope to something worse. You have a point when it comes to banking apps on rooted phones and I'm with you on that but this is not the thread for it
matheusmoreira 2 hours ago [-]
Valve drives significant development of compatibility layers for Linux for the sake of gaming. Their customer base is anything but small. There is potential for this kernel stuff to spill into the entire Linux ecosystem. It was bad enough having to deal with nvidia. I really don't want other companies screwing up the kernel.
jack_pp 56 minutes ago [-]
again fighting against windmills, valve isn't even mentioned in the article. Valve's anti-cheat for CS2 is user-mode.
Do you have evidence valve is working to infect the linux kernel for everyone?
int_19h 45 minutes ago [-]
Realistically I don't see how Valve can avoid this. They want all those games on Steam Deck and the new console. Game devs want KAC. Therefore Valve can either provide them with some way to implement KAC - which effectively requires a "signed kernel / drivers only", same as on Windows - or tell them to go away. Why would they do the latter?
Mind you, it doesn't mean that the Linux kernel will be "infected for everyone". It means that we'll see the desktop Linux ecosystem forking into the "secure" Linux which you don't actually have full control of but which you need to run any app that demands a "secure" environment (it'll start with KAC but inevitably progress to other kinds of DRM such as video streaming etc). Or you can run Linux that you actually control, but then you're missing on all those things. Similar to the current situation with mainline Android and its user-empowering forks.
jack_pp 27 minutes ago [-]
Streaming services already have a solution for environments where they can't run DRM - crap quality stream. My solution to their solution? torrents.
People can dual boot, what's wrong with a special gaming linux distribution?
babypuncher 4 hours ago [-]
I'm starting to think you've never actually played an online game before
babypuncher 4 hours ago [-]
This is the most asinine take I've seen on the subject in a while.
You may think it's your "god-given right" to cheat in multiplayer games, but the overwhelming majority of rational people simply aren't going to play a game where every lobby is ruined by cheaters.
matheusmoreira 4 hours ago [-]
I don't like cheaters either. I just respect their power over their machine and wouldn't see that power usurped by corporations just to put a stop it.
The computers are supposed to be ours. What we say, goes. Cheating may not be moral but attempts to rob us of the power that enables cheating are even less so.
quotemstr 4 hours ago [-]
And if we embraced instead of feared remote attestation and secure enclaves, the days of game companies having this level of access would come to an end.
matheusmoreira 4 hours ago [-]
That's arguably even worse. Remote attestation means you get banned from everything if you "tamper" with "your" computer.
Remote attestation is the ultimate surrender. It's not really your machine anymore. You don't have the keys to the machine. Even if you did, nobody would trust attestations made by those keys anyway. They would only trust Google's keys, Apple's keys. You? You need not apply.
Thaxll 5 hours ago [-]
Game compagny have to have those kernel anti cheat because MS never implemented proper isolation in the first place, if Windows was secured like an apple phone or a console there wouldn't be a need for it.
Anti cheat don't run on modern console, game dev knoes that the latest firmware on a console is secure enough so that the console can't be tempered.
matheusmoreira 4 hours ago [-]
Consoles and phones are "secure" because you don't own them. They aren't yours. They belong to the corporations. They're just generously allowing you to use the devices. And only in the ways they prescribe.
This is the exact sort of nonsense situation I want to prevent. We should own the computers, and the corporations should be forced to simply suck it up and deal with it. Cheating? It doesn't matter. Literal non-issue compared to the loss of our power and freedom.
It's just sad watching people sacrifice it all for video games. We were the owners of the machine but we gave it all up to play games. This is just hilarious, in a sad way.
huthuthukhuo 2 hours ago [-]
who are you to judge what gamers should care about?
matheusmoreira 2 hours ago [-]
A fellow gamer.
huthuthukhuo 2 hours ago [-]
one of those secure consoles you talk about, Xbox, is running Windows as OS
dxuh 1 hours ago [-]
I feel like this whole problem is just made up. Back in the day, when I played lots of Counter Strike, we had community servers. If a cheater joined, some admin was already online and kicked them right away. I'm sure we hit some people that were not actually cheaters, but they would just go to another server. And since there was no rank, no league, no rewards (like skins, drops, etc.), there was no external reward for cheating. It annoys me that cheating in competitive video games seems like a bigger problem than it has been in the past for no good reason.
Retr0id 7 hours ago [-]
This got me wondering how easy it'd be to automate discovery of BYOVD vulns with LLMs (both offensively and defensively)
jrockway 5 hours ago [-]
I still don't understand why people don't cheat in FPSes by looking at the video stream and having a USB mouse that emits the right mouse movements. (The simplest thing is to just click when someone's head is under your crosshair, in games with hitscan weapons.)
raincole 5 hours ago [-]
They do. Cheats that read rendered pixels are nothing new.
biang15343100 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
istillcantcode 6 hours ago [-]
I could have sworn online gambling people fixed this years ago with just wifi. I thought I remembered reading a comment on here about the online gambling for kids no cheating people not talking to the online gambling for adults no cheating people.
nichch 5 hours ago [-]
The "just wifi" is about getting your true geolocation so regulated gaming platforms can operate legally. Ironically, I bet whatever API they use can be intercepted by a kernel level process.
They also have VM checks. I "accidentally" logged into MGM from a virtual machine. They put my account on hold and requested I write a "liability statement" stating I would delete all "location altering software" and not use it again. (Really!)
Morromist 5 hours ago [-]
That would be interesting if they did.
looking at cards is a way easier problem than rendering a 3d world with other players bouncing around. I imagine you could just send the card player basially a screenshot of what you want them to see and give them no other data to work with and that would mostly solve cheating.
But gambling can be way more complicated than just looking at cards so maybe there's a lot more to it.
Rendered at 08:49:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It'd be really interesting to see what would happen - for instance, what fraction of players would pick each pool during the first few weeks after launch, and then how many of them would switch after? What about players who joined a few months or a year after launch?
Unfortunately, pretty much the only company that could make this work is Valve, because they're the only one who actually cares for players and is big enough that they could gather meaningful data. And I don't think that even Valve will see enough value in this to dedicate the substantial resources it'd take to try to implement.
This is roughly what Valve does for CS2. But, as far as I understand, it's not very effective and unfortunately still results in higher cheating rates than e.g. Valorant.
The example still kind of applies. In the CS world, serious players use Faceit for matchmaking, which requires you to install a kernel-level anticheat. This is basically what you're suggesting, but operated by a 3rd party.
But anyway counterstrike did have community policing of lobbies called overwatch - https://counterstrike.fandom.com/wiki/Overwatch
It was terrible as it required the community to conclude beyond reasonable doubt the suspect was cheating, and cheats today are sophisticated enough to make that conclusion very difficult to make
I guess I didn't exactly make that clear...
A few of the arguments advanced by the "anti-anticheat" crowd that inevitably pops up in these threads are "anticheat is ineffective so there's no point to using it" and "anticheat is immoral because players aren't given a choice to use it or not and most of them would choose to not use it".
I don't believe that either of these are true (and given the choice I would almost never pick the no-anticheat queue), but there's not a lot of good high-quality data to back that up. Hence, the proposal for a dual-queue system to try to gather that data.
Putting in the community review of the no-anticheat pool is just to head off the inevitable goalpost-moving of "well of course no system would be worse than a crappy system (anticheat), you need to compare the best available alternative (community moderation)".
Cheaters are by definition anomalies, they operate with information regular players do not have. And when they use aimbots they have skills other players don't have.
If you log every single action a player takes server-side and apply machine learning methods it should be possible to identify these anomalies. Anomaly detection is a subfield of machine learning.
It will ultimately prove to be the solution, because only the most clever of cheaters will be able to blend in while still looking like great players. And only the most competently made aimbots will be able to appear like great player skills. In either of those cases the cheating isn't a problem because the victims themselves will never be sure.
There is also another method that the server can employ: Players can be actively probed with game world entities designed for them to react to only if they have cheats. Every such event would add probability weight onto the cheaters. Ultimately, the game world isn't delivered to the client in full so if done well the cheats will not be able to filter. For example: as a potential cheater enters entity broadcast range of a fake entity camping in an invisible corner that only appears to them, their reaction to it is evaluated (mouse movements, strategy shift, etc). Then when it disappears another evaluation can take place (cheats would likely offer mitigations for this part). Over time, cheaters will stand out from the noise, most will likely out themselves very quickly.
So are very good players, very bad players, players with weird hardware issues, players who just got one in a million lucky…
When you have enough randomly distributed variables, by the law of big numbers some of them will be anomalous by pure chance. You can't just look at any statistical anomaly and declare it must mean something without investigating further.
In science, looking at a huge number of variables and trying to find one or two statistically significant variables so you can publish a paper is called p hacking. This is why there are so many dubious and often even contradictory "health condition linked to X" articles.
They will all cluster in very different latent spaces.
You don't automatically ban anomalies, you classify them. Once you have the data and a set of known cheaters you ask the model who else looks like the known cheaters.
Online games are in a position to collect a lot of data and to also actively probe players for more specific data such as their reactions to stimuli only cheaters should see.
> With that goal in mind, we released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using. This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits. Each of the accounts banned today read from this "secret" area in the client, giving us extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.
https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/3677788723152833273
Anyway, this isn’t the Olympics, a professional sport, or Chess. It’s more like pickup league. Preserving competitive purity should be a non-goal. Rather, aim for fun matches. Matchmaking usually tries to find similar skill level opponents anyway, so let cheaters cheat their way out of the wider population and they’ll stop being a problem.
Or, let players watch their killcams and tag their deaths. Camper, aimbot, etc etc. Then (for players that have a good sample size of matches) cluster players to use the same tactics together.
Treating games like serious business has sucked all the fun out of it.
Matching based on skill works only as long as you have an abundance of players you can do that based on. When you have to account for geography, time of day, momentary availability, and skill level, you realize that you have fractured certain players far too much that it’s not fun for them anymore. Keep in mint that “cheaters” are also looking for matches that would maximize their cheats. Maybe it’s 8PM Pacific Time with tons of players there, but it’s 3 AM somewhere else with much limited number of players. Spoof your ping and location to be there and have fun sniping every player in the map. Sign up for new accounts on every play, who cares. Your fun as a cheater is to watch others lose their shit. You’re not building a character with history and reputation. You are heat sniping others while they are not realizing it. It may sound limited in scope and not worth the effort for you, but it’s millions of people out there tht ruin the game for everyone.
Almost every game I know of lets players “watch their kill cam”, and cheaters have adapted. The snipped people have a bias to vote the sniper was cheating, and the snipers have a bias to vote otherwise. Lean one way or the other, and it’s another post on /r/gaming of how your game sucks.
Unpopular opinion: cheaters don’t, griefers do.
“Cheater” is a pejorative for someone who sidesteps the rules and uses technology instead of, uh, pardon a potentially word choice, innate skills. They don’t inherently want to see others suffer as they stomp - it’s a matchmaking bug they’re put where they don’t belong. They just want to do things they cannot do on their own, but what are technically possible. A more positive term for that is a “hacker”.
Griefers are a different breed, they don’t just enjoy own success but get entertained by others’ suffering. Not a cheating issue TBH (cheats merely enable more opportunities), more like “don’t match us anymore, we don’t share the same ideas of fun” thing. “Black hat” is close enough term I guess.
YMMV, but if someone performs adequately for my skill levels (that is, they also don’t play well) then they don’t deprive me of any fun irrespective of how they’re playing.
Yes, its prize pool is order of magnitude higher than either of Olympics sports or Chess.
That solution only works on servers hosted by players - I've never seen huge game companies that run their own servers (like GTA) have dedicated server admins. I guess they think they can just code cheaters out of their games, but they never can.
Kernel anti-cheat isn't an elegant solution either. It's another landmine, security holes, false positives, broken dev tools, and custody battles with Windows updates while pushing more logic server-side still means weeks of netcode tuning and a cascade of race conditions every time player ping spikes, so the idea that this folds to "better code disipline" is fantasy.
I play fps competitively and valorant is by far the most least cheater fps game on the market
nothing perfect in software world and this is the best tool for its job
if your pc is so important then maybe don't install these particular software
its all about trade off
It's kind of weird that we still don't have distributed computing infrastructure. Maybe that will be another thing where agents can run near the data their crunching on generic compute nodes.
> The general simplistic answer from those who never had to design such a game or a system of “do everything on the server” is laughably bad.
What “Netflix did” was having dead-simple static file serving appliance for ISPs to host with their Netflix auth on top. In their early days, Netflix had one of the simplest “auth” stories because they didn’t care.
It would add some latency but could be opt-in for those that care enough for all players in a match to take the hit.
You can't make a competitive fps game with a dumb terminal, it can't work because the latency is too high so that's why you have to run local predictive simulation.
You don't want to wait the server to ack your inputs.
I have always wondered why more companies don't do trust based anti cheat management. Many cheats are obvious from anyone in the game, you see people jumping around like crazy, or a character will be able to shoot through walls, or something else that impossible for a non-cheater to do.
Each opponent in the game is getting the information from the cheating player's game that has it doing something impossible. I know it isn't as simple as having the game report another player automatically, because cheaters could report legitimate players... but what if each game reported cheaters, and then you wait for a pattern... if the same player is reported in every game, including against brand new players, then we would know the were a cheater.
Unless cheaters got to be a large percentage of the player population, they shouldn't be able to rig it.
I played COD4 a lot, though not competitively. I used to say that I had a bad day if I didn't get called a cheater once.
I didn't cheat, never have, but some people are just not aware of where the ceiling is.
The cheaters that annoyed us back then were laughably obvious. They'd just hold the button with a machine gun and get headshots after headshots, or something blatant like that.
Out of curiosity I did a quick internet search and a couple of months ago a new wave of bots has emerged. Those bots also join as majority group but never fully join the game, they simply take up slots in a team, preventing others from joining. Makes you wonder why the server isn't timing them out.
Players in some games with custom servers run webs of trust (or rather distrust, shared banlists). They are typically abused to some degree and good players are banned across multiple servers by admins acting in bad faith or just straight up not caring. This rarely ends well.
I used to run popular servers for PvP sandbox games and big communities, and we used votebans/reports to evict good players from casual servers to anarchy ones, where they could compete, but a mod always had to approve the eviction using a pretty non-trivial process. This system was useless for catching cheaters, we got them in other ways. That's for PvP sandboxes - in e-sports grade games reports are useless for anything.
I grew up with star trek and star wars wondering what a “I’ll transfer 20 units to you” meant. Bitcoin was an eye opener in the idea of “maybe this is possible” to me. But it shortly became true to me that it’s not the case. There is no way still for random agents to prove they are not malicious. It’s easier in a network within the confines of Bitcoin network. But maybe I’m not smart enough to come up with a more generalized concept. After all, I was one of the people who read the initial bitcoin white paper on HN and didn’t understand it back then and dismissed it.
And even that's the (relatively) straightforward part. The hard part is doing this without injuring the kernel enough that the only sensible solution for the security conscious is a separate PC for gaming.
(Not being sarcastic.)
Sort of like nuclear weapons
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/01/20/elon-musk-...
Okay, chill. I'm willing to believe that anti-cheat software is "sophisticated", but intercepting system calls doesn't make it so. There is plenty of software that operates at elevated privilege and runs transparently while other software is running, while intentionally being unsophisticated. It's called a kernel subsystem.
This seems much more doable today than in the past as machines boot in moments. Switching from secure "xbox mode" to free form PC mode, would be barely a bump.
Now, I see one major difference, heterogenous vs homogenous hardware (and the associated drivers that come with that). In the xbox world, one is dealing with a very specific hardware platform and a single set of drivers. In the PC world (even in a trusted secure boot path), one is dealing with lots of different hardware and drivers that can all have their exploits. If users are more easily able to modify their PCs and set of drivers one, I'd imagine serious cheaters would gravitate to combinations they know they can exploit to break the secure/trusted boot boundary.
I wonder if there are other problems.
(https://mag.uchicago.edu/billiards)
I was not aware that attackers could potentially manipulate attestation! How could that be done? That would seemingly defeat the point of remote attestation.
https://tee.fail/
Defeating remote attestation will be a key capability in the future. We should be able to fully own our computers without others being able to discriminate against us for it.
There is guidance on "Active" attacks [1], which is to set up your TPM secrets so they additionally require a signature from a secret stored securely on the CPU. But that only addresses secret storage, and does nothing about the compromised measurements. I also don't know what would be capable of providing the CPU secret for x86 processors besides... an embedded/firmware TPM.
[1] https://trustedcomputinggroup.org/wp-content/uploads/TCG_-CP...
A more sophisticated attacker could plausibly extract key material from the TPM itself via sidechannels, and sign their own attestations.
But the main point there is that this setup is prohibitively expensive for most cheaters.
It is not "fake", a software TPM is real TPM but not accepted/approved by anticheat due to inability to prove its provenance
(Disclosure: I am not on the team that works on Vanguard, I do not make these decisions, I personally would like to play on my framework laptop)
https://www.vice.com/en/article/fs-labs-flight-simulator-pas...
Company decides to "catch pirates" as though it was police. Ships a browser stealer to consumers and exfiltrates data via unencrypted channels.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1cibw9r/valorant...
https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/634974-...
Covertly screenshots your screen and sends the image to their servers.
https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...
https://twitter.com/TheWack0lian/status/779397840762245124
https://fuzzysecurity.com/tutorials/28.html
https://github.com/FuzzySecurity/Capcom-Rootkit
Yes, a literal privilege escalation as a service "anticheat" driver.
Trusting these companies is insane.
Every video game you install is untrusted proprietary software that assumes you are a potential cheater and criminal. They are pretty much guaranteed to act adversarially to you. Video games should be sandboxed and virtualized to the fullest possible extent so that they can access nothing on the real system and ideally not even be able to touch each other. We really don't need kernel level anticheat complaining about virtualization.
You do not need kernel access to make spyware that takes screenshots. You do not need a privileged service to read the user’s browser history.
You can do all of this, completely unprivileged on Windows. People always seem to conflate kernel access with privacy which is completely false. It would in fact be much harder to do any of these things from kernel mode.
There are far better ways to detect cheating, such as calculating statistics on performance and behaviour and simply binning players with those of similar competency. This way, if cheating gives god-like behaviour, you play with other godlike folks. No banning required. Detecting the thing cheating allows is much easier than detecting ways in which people gain that thing, it creates a single point of detection that is hard to avoid and can be done entierly server side, with multiple teirs how mucb server side calculation a given player consumes. Milling around in bronze levels? Why check? If you aren't performing so well that yoh can leave low ranks, perhaps we need cheats as a handicap, unless co sistently performing well out of distribution, at which point you catch smurfing as well.
point is focusing on detecting the thing people care about rather than one of the myriad of ways people may gain that unfair edge, is going to be easier and more robust while asking for less ergregious things of users.
Anti-cheat is not used to "protect" bronze level games. FACEIT uses a kernel level anti cheat, and FACEIT is primarily used by the top 1% of CS2 players.
A lot of the "just do something else" crowd neglects to realize that anticheat is designed to protect the integrity of the game at the highest levels of play. If the methods you described were adequate, the best players wouldn't willingly install FACEIT - they would just stick with VAC which is user-level.
> There are far better ways to detect cheating, such as calculating statistics on performance
Ask any CS player how VAC’s statistical approach compares to Valorant’s Vanguard and you will stop asserting such foolishness
The problem with what you are saying is that cheaters are extremely determined and skilled, and so the cheating itself falls on a spectrum, as do the success of various anticheat approaches. There is absolutely no doubt that cheating still occurs with kernel level anticheats, so you’re right it didn’t “solve” the problem in the strictest sense. But as a skilled player in both games, only one of them is meaningfully playable while trusting your opponents aren’t cheating - it’s well over an order of magnitude in difference of frequency.
Simply put, the game companies want to own our machines and tell us what we can or can't do. That's offensive. The machine is ours and we make the rules.
I single out kernel level anticheats because they are trying to defeat the very mitigations we're putting in place to deal with the exact problems you mentioned. Can't isolate games inside a fancy VFIO setup if you have kernel anticheat taking issue with your hypervisor.
By this same logic: As far as I'm concerned, if the game developer only wants to allow players running anticheat to use their servers then they're just exercising their god given rights as the owner of the server.
My position is this is unfair discrimination that should be punished with the same rigor as literal racism. Video games are the least of our worries here. We have vital services like banks doing this. Should be illegal.
You can argue about the methods used for anticheat, but your comment here is trying to defend the right to cheat in online games with other people. Just no.
I rather suspect that the reason for this is the current gaming economy of unlockable cosmetics that you can either grind for, or pay for. If people can cheat in single player or PvE, they can unlock the cosmetics without paying. And so...
Don't play with untrusted randoms. Play with people you know and trust. That's the true solution.
Kernel level AC is a compromise for sure and it's the gamers job to assess if the game is worth the privacy risk but I'd say it's much more their right to take that risk than the cheaters right to ruin 9 other people's time for their own selfish amusement
If it kills online gaming, then so be it. I accept that sacrifice. The alternative leads to the destruction of everything the word hacker ever stood for.
You are hijacking this thread about VOLUNTARY ceasing of freedom as if the small community even willing to install these is a slippery slope to something worse. You have a point when it comes to banking apps on rooted phones and I'm with you on that but this is not the thread for it
Do you have evidence valve is working to infect the linux kernel for everyone?
Mind you, it doesn't mean that the Linux kernel will be "infected for everyone". It means that we'll see the desktop Linux ecosystem forking into the "secure" Linux which you don't actually have full control of but which you need to run any app that demands a "secure" environment (it'll start with KAC but inevitably progress to other kinds of DRM such as video streaming etc). Or you can run Linux that you actually control, but then you're missing on all those things. Similar to the current situation with mainline Android and its user-empowering forks.
People can dual boot, what's wrong with a special gaming linux distribution?
You may think it's your "god-given right" to cheat in multiplayer games, but the overwhelming majority of rational people simply aren't going to play a game where every lobby is ruined by cheaters.
The computers are supposed to be ours. What we say, goes. Cheating may not be moral but attempts to rob us of the power that enables cheating are even less so.
Remote attestation is the ultimate surrender. It's not really your machine anymore. You don't have the keys to the machine. Even if you did, nobody would trust attestations made by those keys anyway. They would only trust Google's keys, Apple's keys. You? You need not apply.
Anti cheat don't run on modern console, game dev knoes that the latest firmware on a console is secure enough so that the console can't be tempered.
This is the exact sort of nonsense situation I want to prevent. We should own the computers, and the corporations should be forced to simply suck it up and deal with it. Cheating? It doesn't matter. Literal non-issue compared to the loss of our power and freedom.
It's just sad watching people sacrifice it all for video games. We were the owners of the machine but we gave it all up to play games. This is just hilarious, in a sad way.
They also have VM checks. I "accidentally" logged into MGM from a virtual machine. They put my account on hold and requested I write a "liability statement" stating I would delete all "location altering software" and not use it again. (Really!)
looking at cards is a way easier problem than rendering a 3d world with other players bouncing around. I imagine you could just send the card player basially a screenshot of what you want them to see and give them no other data to work with and that would mostly solve cheating.
But gambling can be way more complicated than just looking at cards so maybe there's a lot more to it.