[HN Gopher] Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-...
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Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store
pages
Author : jrepinc
Score : 892 points
Date : 2024-10-30 19:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gamingonlinux.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gamingonlinux.com)
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| After the crowdstrike disaster 3rd party kernel drivers need to
| be shunned for non critical applications.
|
| Games publishers have been bad actors in this space for a long
| time now. The genshin impact anticheat was used in a malware
| campaign. Rockstar was very misleading trying to imply their
| kernel driver not being compatible with the steam deck was valves
| fault.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| What decides critical or non-critical.
|
| One could argue that a game isn't critical but one could say
| it's critical to stop hackers.
|
| If you were to take the stance that gaming isn't critical than
| with that logic you're then claiming multiplayer hacking is a
| feature of the game.
|
| Doesn't do well for the community or the company. But nor do
| the rootkits do good for the consumer.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Critical as in "my gpu is a paperweight without a driver".
| sgjohnson wrote:
| GPU driver can technically be userland too.
|
| Look at what Apple has done in recent years. kexts (kernel-
| level drivers) are basically all but unsupported today, and
| both DriverKit and IOKit are fully userland.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Performance critical drivers are always going to be
| kernel mode.
| avery17 wrote:
| It hasn't stopped hackers though.
| caiomassan wrote:
| at least they need to search more than the first cheat
| option on google.
| lomase wrote:
| To be fair it stopped hackers for a while. Many people said
| Valorant did not have cheaters.
|
| But nowdays the Valorant community complains about hackers
| almost as the CS community.
| orwin wrote:
| It's because nowadays cheats run on a secondary machine,
| often a Pi,so rootkits have less impacts.
| Nadya wrote:
| If they worked to any acceptable level of efficacy then they
| could be tolerated. They're only tolerated by people who
| think they work as well as they claim to work (security
| theater) but anyone who knows about the performance impacts
| and/or are tech-savvy enough to understand it is a rootkit
| and potential exploit (that would fully pwn your device)
| hates them.
|
| Some cheats are getting rather sophisticated now. There's an
| ever-increasing number of Pi-devices where the cheating is
| done externally.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpvwjC1_Luo
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=revk5r5vqxA
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| They're also chosen by users when the game is filled with
| cheater. Counterstrike 2 is an example of this with players
| moving to FaceIT and ESEA (with kernel anti cheat) as the
| higher ranks of official competitive matchmaking are filled
| with cheaters.
| lomase wrote:
| FaceIT works better than normal matchaking, but I am not
| sure is because is a Kernel level anticheat.
|
| FaceIT only sells one thing, matchmaking, so they have
| people manually reviewing games. A thing that Valve will
| never do.
| tadfisher wrote:
| That's child's play. The vogue is PCIe devices that sniff
| draw calls, memory transfers and network activity on the
| bus.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Performance impact is overblown, it was proven that the
| lost of perf is marginal when implemented properly.
| Nadya wrote:
| Proven by who and what proof? Because Denuvo is the only
| one outspoken about how it doesn't impact performance
| despite all evidence to the contrary and they provide no
| evidence of their own beyond claiming it doesnt. Then
| saying they'll prove it doesn't and then backing out of
| proving it.
|
| https://www.resetera.com/threads/irdeto-backtracks-on-
| plans-...
| Novosell wrote:
| DRM and anti-cheat aren't the same though. That link is
| talking about denuvo DRM, not denuvo anti-cheat. Also,
| just because one implementation impacts performance
| doesn't mean they all have to.
| stuckkeys wrote:
| What is the name of the tool that he is using on the 2nd
| link you shared? You know for science.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > one could say it's critical to stop hackers.
|
| It's never critical to stop hackers in a videogame IMO. We
| need to stop being so damn serious about _gaming_.
| codebje wrote:
| Rampant cheating will wreck competitive multiplayer games
| fast, so there are perspectives from which this critical.
|
| (I'd still lean towards expecting game houses to find
| another way, kernel drivers are still client side trust
| mechanisms).
| heromal wrote:
| I think the point is that competitive multiplayer games
| are not critical. Scripting in e.g. league of legends
| probably doesn't register on 99% of humanities "top 100
| most critical things in my life" radar.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That was my point. We forgot we were gaming, probably due
| to all the money being thrown around.
| codebje wrote:
| No-one likes playing with a cheat in Uno, either, and the
| table stakes for Uno are pretty low.
| prerok wrote:
| For some people it's no. 1 priority in life. What's your
| point?
| codebje wrote:
| The LoL game development studio probably rates their game
| being a commercial success as a significantly critical
| thing.
| prerok wrote:
| Well, the problem is eventual consistency and these games
| have a hell to consolidate properly.
|
| One user is on a connection with 10ms latency, the other
| user is on 50 ms latency. Now, if first user does
| something, and second user can either do something to
| evade or can do something that actually prevents the
| first user from acting, how do you consolidate that?
|
| The actual timestamp of when exactly what happened helps
| immensely, but you have to trust the timestamp. And how
| can you know that is not manipulated?
|
| But... that's just the surface. Consider: one client uses
| a rendering that takes 25ms longer to show up and another
| client does not render textures/shadows etc. That client
| is faster and the sender can even send "official"
| response times, but would still give an advantage.
|
| So, I am not sure this can be solved serverside. But... I
| don't play these games anymore and would never opt for a
| rootkit to be installed just so I can play. I can imagine
| plenty of people, though, who would.
| bmicraft wrote:
| You might be able to match-make between clients with
| similar latency and then "enforce" that latency server
| side by delaying things that "happen faster" then the
| previously measured latency
| mafuy wrote:
| No, this implies that actions are in response to
| something. This is not true. I can shoot my gun at any
| time, and even randomly. It does not depend on an
| opponent starting to move.
| codebje wrote:
| Remember that you don't need perfection: you need people
| to believe that they're likely enough to get caught that
| they don't want to use a pre-canned cheat, and you need
| just enough cheat detection mechanisms to make it hard
| for people to make new cheats. Not all of that has to be
| technological: you can spread rumours that your cheater
| ban waves are bigger than they actually are, for example,
| and that'll keep more people from even trying in the
| first place.
|
| You don't have to trust the timestamp - and you
| shouldn't. You can use a bunch of methods to go from
| untrusted to grudgingly accepted: requiring monotonicity
| means cheating clients have to be permanently slower
| rather than selectively slower. Having tolerances for out
| of order packet rates or accepted deltas before
| discarding player actions will have some false positives
| for players on terrible networks, but will also reduce
| the impact of any possible timestamp-related cheats.
|
| It can't be fully solved server side, not without
| sacrificing acceptable performance. I reckon it can
| probably be dealt with enough on server side to keep
| cheating to a tolerably low level. It's probably cheaper
| to just license a windows rootkit though.
| lomase wrote:
| If not having hackes is critical for a competitive
| videogame CS and Dota 2 will be dead.
| codebje wrote:
| Keeping cheating to a low enough level that players don't
| quit in frustration (or never start playing due to bad
| press) is critical. Eliminating it entirely is not.
|
| Valve added vote kicks to CS to help keep cheating (and
| other antisocial behaviours) under control - it seems
| pretty important to them.
| 0x457 wrote:
| > (I'd still lean towards expecting game houses to find
| another way, kernel drivers are still client side trust
| mechanisms).
|
| Well, this problem simply can't be solved server-side
| only. Client-side can't be validated without rootkit (and
| even then it's not enough, but enough to deter majority
| of cheaters).
| kelnos wrote:
| I think you're framing this the wrong way.
|
| Is it fun to be a non-cheater, and join a multi-player game
| where there are other players using software cheats that
| let them easily beat you every single time?
|
| I'm pretty sure I would quickly stop playing that game, and
| demand the publisher refund my money. That's just not fun.
|
| And that's just as a casual gamer. For people who compete
| and win prizes, endorsements, etc., the stakes are a bit
| higher.
|
| I'm not saying kernel-level rootkits installed on
| everyone's machine is the answer, but letting people cheat
| isn't going to work either.
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| Community-run and moderated servers easily fixed this
| issue decades ago. Maybe video games should be fun
| centers of community again instead of maximally isolating
| and atomizing skinner boxes designed to make children
| addicted to endlessly practicing and competing at
| worthless skills so the sunk cost keeps them buying loot
| boxes
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Lets call them what they really are, rootkits.
| jrepinc wrote:
| This, so much this. Also often spyware.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| First party malware.
| kulahan wrote:
| Can't wait to find out what China hid in Riot's Vanguard
| rootkit for all their games. It's 100% a conspiracy theory,
| but nobody can convince me it's perfectly clean, or if it is,
| that there isn't an easy way to add some power to it quietly.
| jsheard wrote:
| If I wanted to deploy a trojan horse then the last place I
| would try to hide it is in an anti-cheat driver that will
| without any doubt be exhaustively analysed by people
| attempting to bypass it.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| State sponsored actors only target a few people and they
| only send the backdoored version to their target list.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Ah yes, that's why stuxnet wasn't a big deal
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| What do you mean? They burned several high value 0days on
| a high value target. Why wouldn't China burn a high value
| backdoor on a target they deem valuable enough.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Gamers are great targets. They'll disable security for
| higher polling rates. Not discerning, gladly walk to the
| slaughterhouse.
| phito wrote:
| There's a ton of gamers that like to figure out how the
| game itself works. There's a ton of them trying to figure
| out how anti cheats work, sometimes to cheat, but more
| often because they're curious, resourceful teenagers
| taking it as a challenge.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Oh, I know. That's how my career was started. I made
| invitational in CS: Source _(CAL)_ and then sold cheats
| to pay for college. My first Real Job was through a
| teammate.
|
| Far more would have accepted a RAT and been deprived
| money than expressed genuine interest. Some did... not
| many. Most wanted the acclaim without the effort.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| But also there's parties there with a big interest in
| circumventing these securities, and have done so for
| decades. The new release of RDR for PC (shamefully asking
| $50 for a 14 year old game) was cracked within days, if
| not earlier, of its releae.
| vkou wrote:
| Ah, yes, for most of us, getting our computer pwned is
| _just like being murdered_.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| l o l
|
| Fine, they'll gladly eat shit
| vkou wrote:
| How much shit, and how does it compare to the risk
| profile of, say, not wearing a five points seat belt and
| motorcycling helmet while driving, or a bulletproof vest
| when going to school, or an N95 mask literally
| everywhere?
|
| Security theorists are always ready to tell us about the
| horrifying risks of installing kernel-level code from a
| vendor, but can they actually quantify the likelihood
| times damage those billions of installations have
| inflicted on Joe Random's life?
|
| And contrast them to other risks that we regularly take
| in the name of comfort and convenience?
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I'm not really that interested in chasing this, but a
| point I do want to make: it isn't just risk.
|
| If you want to participate in a lot of these multiplayer
| games that place cheating far too highly, you can't use a
| hypervisor. You must have gaming device and computing
| device. They cannot be the same.
|
| That's fine for most, but I consider it shit. VFIO makes
| it possible for a big computer to make a smaller gaming
| one. Ask me how I know.
|
| My greater point is I don't care if I get cheated out of
| a finals match. I can actually speak from experience. I
| prefer autonomy over my devices. I kind of want to eat
| poop with them. A little.
| kelnos wrote:
| Funny that you initially used "Joe Ransom" as your
| example name (before your edit), as that describes one of
| the possible situations our friend Joe can end up in:
| malware that encrypts all his data and asks for a ransom
| to get it back.
| vkou wrote:
| Its possible. Roughly how likely is that to happen to him
| from installing a game with EAC? Are there a lot of
| documented cases of this?
|
| Is it more or less likely than them dying from the 'Rona
| because they didn't wear an N95 24/7?
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| China's national security assistance law came up in the
| TikTok hearings. There's no reason to believe that the CCP
| doesn't have the legal authority to compel Riot to push an
| update with a backdoor to a few select high value targets.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| Companies rule the United States. Companies that do
| business in China are ruled by China. Therefore, the
| United States is ruled by China.
| vkou wrote:
| The same line of thinking leads me to conclude that the
| world is ruled by the United States.
|
| Can we stop with the nationalistic hyperbole already, and
| discuss acute issues, instead of vague fingerwaving at
| the foreign boogieman?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If it is written in C you can always introduce a buffer
| overflow or something similar by just adding a little bit
| of line noise here or there and nobody can prove it was
| deliberate.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| It's closed source and the assembly is obfuscated. You
| don't even need to bother with plausible debiability.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Surely the NSA has tools, people, resources etc to figure
| that out?
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Dedicated to reverse engineering every update to
| vanguard? Huge waste of effort. They would probably just
| steal the source code.
| Maken wrote:
| The NSA just needs a call to Riot headquarters to ensure
| their rootkit is also included.
| Levitating wrote:
| The vanguard drivers are signed by Microsoft, the procedure
| for which includes a safety audit by Microsoft.
|
| The driver is just what the developers say it is (as with
| all other anti-cheat). It provides an untempered interface
| for the userland anti-cheat to use to get info from the
| kernel. Because modern cheats tend to alter the output of
| kernel syscalls by running in the kernel themselves.
|
| I really don't see why anyone needs to think it's anything
| more than that.
|
| If Tencent needed to spy on you so badly there's no reason
| kernel anti-cheats need anything to do with it...
| cmxch wrote:
| It says something about Microsoft when they OK a known
| harmful bootkit that expects your computer to act like an
| XBox with a fancy keyboard (but not too fancy), requests
| invasive changes to UEFI that have broken systems, and
| have an overall opacity that rivals an Arthur C. Clarke
| Monolith.
| gruez wrote:
| >The vanguard drivers are signed by Microsoft, the
| procedure for which includes a safety audit by Microsoft.
|
| Did the crowdstrike driver get the same audit?
| 15155 wrote:
| EAC and other kernel-level anticheat software will
| dynamically load and execute signed payloads at runtime.
| Does Vanguard do this? If so, does Microsoft check these
| payloads?
| Levitating wrote:
| > EAC and other kernel-level anticheat software will
| dynamically load and execute signed payloads at runtime
|
| Are you sure about that?
| 15155 wrote:
| 100%
| perillamint wrote:
| MS usually don't bother with driver audit... They mostly
| rely on EV certificate to check driver dev is a proper
| legal entity.
|
| If they audit properly, they should not let the Asus
| AuraSync driver certified at the first time. (basically
| opens PORT instruction to every userland app,
| unristricted)
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Drivers are generally not audited by Microsoft to be
| signed, you only need to register your EV cert to get it
| signed. Cheat developers have registered their own/gotten
| their hands on EV certificates to create a kernel driver
| cheats. Anti cheat like Battleeye also download anti
| cheat modules at runtime to obfuscate what they do.
| kulahan wrote:
| The level of sophistication that can go into a hack when
| sponsored by a nation-state is incredible. Just remember
| Stuxnet all the way back in '06 or whatever it was. Tech
| was a lot less advanced nearly two decades ago. It's not
| right, imo, to leave your safety up to this process.
| tapoxi wrote:
| I mean, they're not rootkits. Rootkits are either to gain
| root access (thus the name) or to hide something from a user.
| Anticheats don't do either of these.
|
| They expose a kernel API to allow games to verify the state
| of the system, and they're knowingly installed by the user.
| jolmg wrote:
| > They expose a kernel API to allow games to verify the
| state of the system, and they're knowingly installed by the
| user.
|
| Can you give examples of games where you do that?
| billyoyo wrote:
| Riot games use theirs (Vanguard) to improve detection of
| cheating software. basically the idea is by being on from
| the moment the computer is booted up it can validate the
| environment better.
|
| Here's a recent blog post by riot detailing their recent
| deployment of the system for league of legends, the
| biggest online multiplayer game in the world
|
| https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-gb/news/dev/dev-
| vanguard-...
|
| towards the end it talks about how and why it works
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > They expose a kernel API to allow games to verify the
| state of the system
|
| And that API has root access... thus it's a rootkit.
| tapoxi wrote:
| The API doesn't provide root access, it's typically a
| simple "is this game running in a secure environment"
| read API.
|
| I really hate "it's a rootkit!" posts like this because
| it diminishes the severity of actual rootkits.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Can you please clarify how an API which runs _in the
| kernel_ does not have root access? Because I don 't
| believe that's possible, but perhaps I'm wrong.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That's the promise of eBPF.
| coretx wrote:
| I'm already counting down the days for eBPF to blow up in
| our face. But admittedly, it's the cheapest way of
| gaining more capabilities and privileges than you need,
| thus it's here to stay.
| odo1242 wrote:
| The API itself has root access, but does not give user
| space root access, is what I think the commenter is
| trying to say.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| How do you think it is able to tell if the game is
| "running in a secure environment" without having root
| access itself?
| lomase wrote:
| The thing is the Kernel does not have that API.
|
| The real solution, and not the hack Riot uses, is for
| Kernel to provide an API for anticheats, like it does for
| everything useland.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| That's not really possible as long as the kernel allows
| the loading of arbitrary user-provided modules. Because
| the cheater will certainly run the cheat that requires
| kernel mode. If it's run in kernel mode, the API call can
| be intercepted.
|
| How does the anticheat then work? Corewars. It's a cat
| and mouse game between the cheat provider and the game
| developer.
|
| One would need a secure base layer, where also the MS
| anti-cheat lives, and all drivers can only run in a layer
| between this base layer and userland. I think that's
| already done for most of the graphics stack.
|
| On the other hand, I am not convinced I want a system
| where I cannot load arbitrary kernel mode code if I
| choose to do so.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Windows only loads arbitrary modules if you enable some
| debug mode no? If not they need to be signed. But not a
| big hoop for cheat developers, they can get an EV cert to
| sign their own cheat kernel module or abuse a vulnerable
| kernel module.
| OtomotO wrote:
| That's exactly what I tell my friends.
|
| I can't play certain games, because they don't run on Linux
| and even if they did, I am not gonna install a rootkit to run
| them.
| kibwen wrote:
| Getting a Steam Deck has done wonders for my piece of mind.
| I don't need to worry if whatever games I'm installing are
| malicious, because the machine is airgapped from anything
| critical.
| OtomotO wrote:
| Same, but I am only using it for couch gaming
| dark-star wrote:
| piece of mind? or peace of mind?
|
| /nitpick ;-)
| xethos wrote:
| OP shares with others
| Thaxll wrote:
| And yet you install driver on Linux without knowing it, I
| mean Linux has 0 security for drivers.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| When was the last time you had to install a Linux driver
| from out of tree?
| db48x wrote:
| Most people do install Nvidia's out-of-tree graphics
| driver. It is definitely a risk.
| OtomotO wrote:
| I am not using Nvidia since 2011. Last nvidia device was
| bought in 2007.
|
| Back then I migrated to Archlinux and in all these years
| I only had problems with nvidia. Since then they are dead
| to me :)
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| > Most people do install Nvidia's out-of-tree graphics
| driver
|
| Most people that use Nvidia. I specifically don't buy
| Nvidia graphics cards or laptops that use them in my
| Linux computers because they're not in-tree.
| vidarh wrote:
| It's a risk, but a very minor additional one - if you
| trust their hardware with direct access to your PCIe bus,
| you have already given them the metaphorical keys to the
| vault.
| kelnos wrote:
| If you've already put a piece of hardware into your
| computer made by nvidia, installing a kernel driver also
| made by nvidia does not increase your risk at all.
|
| Installing some random anti-cheat kernel driver is not
| the same thing, at all.
| 0x457 wrote:
| But you are not installing a random anti-cheat kernel
| driver, you're installing anti-cheat kernel driver
| provided by a game you've already put on your computer.
| It's very much the same thing.
| screcth wrote:
| User space is not the same as kernel space.
|
| User space applications can't access hardware or physical
| memory. They can't bypass permissions enforced by the OS.
| None of that applies to hardware or kernel drivers.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Where did I say they are the same? We have a kernel-space
| thing (anti-cheat or gpu driver) and a user-space thing
| ((a game actually talks to both) that talks to a kernel-
| space thing.
| screcth wrote:
| I understood that you were making an analogy between
| installing a piece of hardware and its associated kernel
| driver with installing a game and its associated kernel
| anticheat.
|
| When you install a hardware device you are trusting the
| manufacturer with full access to your machine, so
| installing a driver does not give them any more powers.
| You have already "unlocked the door".
|
| When you install a game that runs on user space you are
| not trusting the vendor nearly as much as you are
| trusting a hardware manufacturer. Installing a kernel
| anti cheat is granting them a level of trust and access
| to your machine that they didn't have before.
| 0x457 wrote:
| > When you install a game that runs on user space you are
| not trusting the vendor nearly as much as you are
| trusting a hardware manufacturer.
|
| I'm not sure where this trust comes from. I absolutely do
| not trust any hardware vendor. I just have no choice
| here.
| dwattttt wrote:
| I've always appreciated the forthrightness League of
| Legends deployed here (talking about introducing a kernel
| driver for anti-cheat:
| https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-au/news/dev/dev-null-
| anti...):
|
| > This isn't giving us any surveillance capability we
| didn't already have. If we cared about grandma's secret
| recipe for the perfect Christmas casserole, we'd find no
| issue in obtaining it strictly from user-mode and then
| selling it to The Food Network. The purpose of this
| upgrade is to monitor system state for integrity (so we
| can trust our data) and to make it harder for cheaters to
| tamper with our games (so you can't blame aimbots for
| personal failure).
| II2II wrote:
| A few things to consider here:
|
| - This is an abnormal case. Most hardware will work with
| in-tree drivers. Indeed, few vendors provide out-of-tree
| drivers for Linux.
|
| - Nvidia is an established and reputable source. We
| aren't talking about some small hardware developer who
| doesn't have the resources to create secure drivers.
|
| - Most Nvidia cards have in-tree drivers. There is a loss
| in performance, but the option usually exists.
| coretx wrote:
| Those who do, choose to do so and generally take
| responsibility for their actions. It's not the same as
| tainting a kernel and just winging it.
| reissbaker wrote:
| Approximately no one with a Steam Deck installs Nvidia's
| out of tree graphics driver (because the Steam Deck is
| built on AMD).
| burnished wrote:
| You gotta think about surface area and risk when
| comparing apples to oranges here.
| andyferris wrote:
| Hmm, here's a thought I've never had (but might be obvious
| to others).
|
| Could I run windows as a VM guest under Linux and play
| Fortnite in that (with good GPU performance)? I don't mind
| their rootkit running on some dedicated VM - I'll just
| consider it my Fortnite unikernel.
|
| (I'm also ok with the host OS being Windows or MacOS).
| quenix wrote:
| The anti-cheat will be very unhappy when it performs a
| bunch of arcane heuristics and determines it's running in
| a VM.
| froggit wrote:
| Why would that matter? Pretty sure running in a VM
| doesn't facilitate cheating.
| jhardy54 wrote:
| Running a VM gives the parent the ability to read/write
| arbitrary memory without [even rootkit] anticheat being
| able to detect, which _can_ facilitate cheating, and
| therefore can earn you bans. The whole point of the
| rootkit is that the game can confirm that you don't have
| any way to read /write arbitrary memory.
| andyferris wrote:
| Isn't Windows running under a hyper-v hypervisor these
| days anyway?
|
| In practice, I'd settle for a peer Windows OS, like the
| WSL2 kernel, with the rootkit seperate from my main work
| one. Can I run two copies of Windows simultaneously as
| peers?
| atahanacar wrote:
| Yes.
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF
|
| You basically let your guest OS use your GPU instead of
| the host.
| tw04 wrote:
| Ultimately, this is why we have consoles. We can have
| rootkits, or we can have cheating. Nobody has solved cheat
| prevention without rootkits. If you can, you'd make
| millions, if not billions. It's not like the game creators
| want to have software on your system that has the potential
| to brick your system.
| j-bos wrote:
| By this logic wouldn't chess and go need to be played
| after cavity searches? Cheating is enabled by tech but
| based on what people decide to do.
| lmz wrote:
| Chess and go aren't anonymous at levels people care
| about, and they don't have game publishers and creators
| expecting a return on investment.
| Jach wrote:
| Not sure if you're referencing it but there was a recent
| scandal where it was suspected someone playing against
| Magnus might have had a wireless butt plug to enable some
| cheating...
|
| The sibling comment makes a point about anonymity, I find
| these discussions interesting in comparison with the only
| online competitive game I play these days. It's Tekken,
| and neither the current rendition nor the previous one
| had any real form of anti-cheat. For the current Tekken
| 8, supposedly some players have been banned after manual
| review from the company of replay data, which of course
| doesn't scale. But at the same time it doesn't really
| matter. Cheaters don't seem to be that prevalent, their
| ability to spoil the experience of a match is limited by
| the fact that matches are short, and people can spoil the
| experience in non-cheating ways like plugging, lag
| switching, using a weak computer, and for some sensitive
| players they'll get unreasonably upset by ki
| charging/teabagging/taunting/continuing an attack after
| KO. The status of the highest rank is also not that much
| -- the most status comes from performing well at the big
| in-person tournaments, where it's going to be harder to
| cheat and players are somewhat de-anonymized. If the
| positive incentives to cheat are minimized in the first
| place, you don't need so many negative incentives like
| rootkits.
|
| (It always amazes me how custom controllers and even
| keyboards are allowed in fighting game tournaments,
| officially certain macros are banned and at least for
| Street Fighter certain modes of leverless controllers got
| banned, but it'd be hard to perfectly enforce. And it's
| been hilarious to see the increasing use of fake buttons
| or controller-hiding covers/jackets because it was
| assumed some players were able to see inputs out of their
| peripheral vision before they were registered in-game and
| adjust.)
| jm4 wrote:
| Running games in a VM appliance or an immutable container
| type of environment could be neat. Or some kind of
| hardware device. Like a console on an expansion card that
| could enable a secure environment while still letting you
| use your hardware.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Ultimately, this is why we have consoles._
|
| Nah. Consoles were a decade late to the online gaming
| party, and online gaming on consoles (counting Xbox Live
| as the first concerted attempt) has only been around half
| as long as consoles as a product segment have existed.
| slimsag wrote:
| The real solution is games designed for playing with
| friends and treat all non-friend players as potentially
| malicious.
|
| Early first-person shooter games had this figured out
| (small servers with 20-30 regular players, the server
| admin could choose to ban you), RTS games have this
| figured out, many MMOs have this figured out (interact
| with non-friends sometimes, but they have to 'join your
| party', etc.)
|
| Playing with random strangers on the internet who may
| want to grief/destroy your game, be incredibly toxic, or
| cheat against you in general.. that's the cost of playing
| with random people in a completely public forum.
| vel0city wrote:
| But people largely want matchmaking. They don't want to
| deal with having to find a server of like-minded players,
| they want to hop in a lobby with maybe a few friends,
| pick a map pool, and go.
| rendaw wrote:
| This is a false dichotomy. Genshin is single player. Some
| people play multiplayer only with friends. The only legit
| use for anti-cheat is competitive multiplayer with
| strangers.
| cmxch wrote:
| And in the case of Vanguard, a bootkit.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Cheats and bots are ruining online games though.
| umvi wrote:
| Yeah life sucks when everything and everyone has to be
| untrusted (applies not just video games).
|
| The solution is to build trusted spaces again IMO.
|
| For video games assume that each user is trusted by default.
| As soon as they violate that trust by cheating, they are
| banned permanently for that copy of the game. If they want to
| be trusted again they have to buy another copy of the game to
| get another license. Make it hard to become a member of a
| trusted community and easy to be kicked out of a trusted
| community for violating trust. This would eliminate the vast
| majority of cheating and bots because most gamers are kids
| and having to buy a fresh copy will hit hard. If they abuse
| it enough, make them jump through more hoops like ip bans and
| computer fingerprint bans.
| codebje wrote:
| False positives would very much hurt in that model. But
| returning to a small multiplayer experience with chosen
| friends would work: the in/out decision is local and
| personal.
|
| It's only a problem when you game with strangers.
| billyoyo wrote:
| This is a naive take. Of course these developers already
| permaban cheaters. Firstly many of these games are free to
| play so "getting another license" is a non issue. They're
| doing hardware bans nowadays which are harder to avoid but
| not impossible.
|
| Half the battle is detection though. If you don't detect
| cheaters quick enough they ruin enough games that genuine
| players start getting frustrated and leave. Anti cheats
| help with this detection.
|
| Probably every anti cheat idea you can think of, in terms
| of detection, prevention and punishment, has probably
| already been tried by a large online multiplayer game. It
| is an extremely difficult problem to solve, a constant arms
| race.
| keyringlight wrote:
| It's going on a tangent, but one naive take which
| continues to amuse me when it comes up is community/third
| party servers and policing of cheating. As though
| delegating that responsibility is the goal or that it
| would scale to handle the size of modern playerbases
| including the ratio of admins to players to be able to
| monitor and respond to (alleged) cheaters
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| With community servers an admin only has to police their
| server, which is a fixed number. More players, more
| servers, more admins.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| But as gaming has grown and become more mainstream, the
| ratio of enthusiasts who are willing to admin to casual
| players who don't has changed. Server sizes have changed
| over time with smaller games like 5v5 becoming way more
| common.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Just put a password on the server then.
| umvi wrote:
| It's not possible to completely solve this problem with
| technology.
|
| High level chess players (GMs) can win with just a few
| bits of information transmitted to them by a cheating
| accomplice (a cough if it's a critical position to spend
| extra time on, etc). Similarly, high level gamers only
| need the slightest of edges to win, and therefore only
| need the slightest of cheating.
|
| That's why I think trusted user bases are the way to go.
| My initial ideas were naive, but I think the core idea is
| solid. If you had to pay $1000 to enter a "trusted club"
| which uses your hardware fingerprint, and all of your
| online interactions in a game were guaranteed to be with
| other people who paid $1000 to be in the club, would that
| not be a large deterrent to cheating?
| billyoyo wrote:
| That's just elitist though isn't it? These games are
| enjoyed by players from all over the world, including
| massive numbers of players in countries with far less
| average disposable income. Its common in many countries
| to go to an internet cafe to play these games as they
| don't own their own hardware even.
|
| It would also massively reduce the number of players.
| Competitive multiplayer games rely on large active
| playerbases for fast and fair matchmaking. That's why
| free to play has become the dominant model for these
| games. If you have to pay $1000 to play one of these
| games, they have no chance vs. the competition.
|
| Obviously you can't completely solve this problem, but
| you can minimize it as much as possible.
|
| Also these sorts of "trusted clubs" do exist for certain
| games (e.g. FaceIt for CounterStrike) but ultimately it
| still just relies on anti-cheat to establish that trust.
| umvi wrote:
| Money is just one way of establishing "trust clubs". Time
| is another. For free-to-play games, you could make it so
| that users are peered with other users who have put in
| the same amount of time into the system. So if you've
| gone a whole year without being flagged for cheating in
| the system, you'll be paired up with other users who have
| also gone years without being flagged.
|
| If you create a new account, you'll be peered with other
| new accounts (low trust). Still possible to cheat, but
| the cost is very high (years of effort to get accepted in
| the best trust clubs)
| Novosell wrote:
| CSGO used to have that, more or less. You could play for
| free but then you were not in the "prime" matchmaking
| pool. Only by paying, something like 13EUR, and
| registering your phone number, which could only be
| registered once, would you get prime matchmaking. I
| thought it made quite a bit of sense but I think they
| scrapped the system in CS2.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Talking just about games, this really doesn't work with
| free games. Even if there is a lengthy 'lockout' period
| from the real game, many games have rampant and cheap
| accounts for sale and doing so will make the game
| experience worse.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Perhaps, but it's far better to have cheaters and bots than
| to have games require a rootkit to play them.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Well no, because they ruin the online experience making
| people not play the game.
|
| (in theory, GTA online has had / still has huge problems
| with bots and cheats but still earns the publisher hundreds
| of millions a year)
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| They have problems because they're cheap and don't want
| to pay to host servers. They don't want to let people
| host their own authoritative server either because of the
| $billions in fake money.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I understand that cheaters suck. I'm saying that in this
| case, the cure (kernel access) is worse than the disease.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think that's a matter of opinion.
|
| Personally I find both unacceptable: I won't play a game
| that requires me to install a rootkit, and I won't play a
| game where cheaters and bots run rampant, ruining the fun
| for everyone.
|
| So hopefully there's a solution to this that doesn't
| require a rootkit.
| Thaxll wrote:
| You definitely don't play games, this is one of the reasons
| why people stop playing games.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I do play games, a lot. I even play multiplayer games.
| So, you're wrong.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Which ones?
| evanriley wrote:
| And Kernel level anti-cheat isn't stopping them.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Back when communities hosted servers instead of companies, it
| seemed less common, even though it was easier to do.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Because games were less common. If you look at community
| hosted servers now they commonly have more anti cheat, not
| less. Counterstrike with FaceIT and ESEA. Even FiveM for
| GTA V rolled out a custom anti cheat before it was added to
| the official game.
| prerok wrote:
| Life was a bit simpler then. At that point in time the
| leaders also did not get millions for their wins.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Because those were community servers often built around
| community. There weren't a lot of them either.
|
| If admins allow cheating - people that want to play would
| leave the server
|
| If live in a non-metro area, you probably have a handful of
| server your latency allows you to play on - getting banned
| would be a big suck
|
| Now you just click "play game" and you get match with some
| strangers you might never play ever again with.
| Financially, those privately hosted servers no longer make
| economical sense for game publishers.
| eertami wrote:
| Back then you could just quit the server/match if somebody
| was obviously cheating (or they got banned).
|
| With competitive matchmaking cheaters can hold players
| hostage until the end of the match, as leaving incurs
| penalties and cooldowns that temporarily ban you from
| playing.
| YPPH wrote:
| There are also cheaters on old games (Modern Warfare II
| (2009)) that will inject code into your client to disable
| the quit menu, so you have to dashboard. I can't imagine
| what psyche someone must have to not only cheat, but
| force people to play against them.
| pid-1 wrote:
| That was not my personal experience. CS and Warcraft 3
| community lobbies featured rampant cheating. Way more than
| CS:GO and Dota 2.
| YPPH wrote:
| This is why I preferred console gaming. You never encountered
| cheaters until very late in the console's generation.
| Crossplay ruined that.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| _> The genshin impact anticheat was used in a malware campaign.
| Rockstar was very misleading trying to imply their kernel
| driver not being compatible with the steam deck was valves
| fault._
|
| I mean, nothing of this is new. ESEA, one of the most
| influential esports leagues, was caught using its anticheat _to
| mine Bitcoin_ in 2013. [1] This is long out of control,
| probably since the days BattlEye switched to ring0 in 2012 due
| to chronic cheating in the DayZ mod, or maybe earlier. Modern
| anticheats are full-fledged rootkits with extremely complex and
| targeted payloads siphoning customer data and hijacking all
| sorts of stuff, and that 's not a theory, they actively abuse
| players' trust and indifference.
|
| If you care about your data and the control of your devices,
| you should probably avoid them entirely, or at least use them
| on dedicated gaming PCs on a clean identity, and keep them
| separate from your LAN and your non-gaming digital life.
|
| [1] https://play.esea.net/forums/492102
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| People really need to find a better word than 'rootkit' to
| describe software that users willingly and intentionally give
| root access.
| drilbo wrote:
| I think it's fair to say that _a lot_ of users have no idea
| they 're doing so, hence why changes like the one in TFA
| are necessary to encourage transparency around these
| practices
| chainingsolid wrote:
| I've ran the installer for Vallorent. I don't remember it
| telling me it was going to go run code in ring 0. And I
| would likely have ended the install there if they listed
| any of the downsides.
|
| For most gamers you'd have to invoke Cloud Strike, to
| explain whats happening. They play games not study CS.
| Nathanba wrote:
| I agree, we need something that emphasizes that it executes
| undesired functions. "Trojan horse" would fit better but
| it's associated with computer virii now. I think I would
| call it something like "Traitor software".. it generally
| does the functions you installed it for and pretends to be
| normal software but then when you aren't looking it betrays
| you later.
| froggit wrote:
| It's quite literally kit running as root...
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| It's quite literally not. Root is technically a user with
| extra rights (including modifying the kernel, but there
| is still an API the root user has to go through). This is
| running as part of the kernel. It's not running in
| userland "as root".
|
| A rootkit is something that gives other users the power
| of root.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| That's taking it too far. By that logic, rootkits can't
| exist for Windows because the super user is called
| "Administrator", not "root".
| hayst4ck wrote:
| Crowdstrike isn't even the worst case. The SolarWinds disaster
| is the worst case scenario.
|
| You have a closed source rootkit designed for finding data in
| raw memory (like passwords from an unlocked password manager),
| loaded into many gamer's machines, which many software
| engineers are. Some anti cheat explicitly support's arbitrary
| remote code execution by design. Many people mix their personal
| password vaults with their company's, which means that if you
| successfully hack an anticheat company and you can read the raw
| memory of an opened password manager with a program that is
| already designed to scan all processes memory, you now
| potentially have extremely valuable credentials. A small
| portion will even do things like add their 2fac keys into their
| vaults.
|
| Here is Gabe Newell's thoughts on AntiCheat that are very
| relevant to this thread:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_an...
|
| Of course the other problem is the 23andMe problem and
| enshitification. Even if the data uploaded by anti-cheat isn't
| used right now, the storage of data alone creates incentive for
| abuse.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Something slightly related happened recently. A bit of
| malware that was distributed as a mod for BeamNG was
| installed by a high up Disney employee, who was also logged
| in to some internal work stuff. The hackers were able to leak
| huge amounts of company data.
| gauge_field wrote:
| I just want to spam skill shot with ranged-heros on Aram 1-2
| times a week. No way I am running vanguard for that!!!!
| lousken wrote:
| Good, the sooner devs realize they need to do server side
| properly, the better
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Aaany day now...
| teen wrote:
| I think most of these companies do do the server side properly.
| There are plenty of hacks that just make a client play ungodly
| well. Like macros, aimbots, cooldown tracking, auto-hex
| plopz wrote:
| I'm not sure about that first part, some of the biggest games
| like gtav is an embarrassment in the concept of never trust
| the client.
| Matheus28 wrote:
| GTA V is an exception because it's so easy to cheat in. I
| believe it's peer-to-peer with no verification among peers
| that what happened should actually have happened. It's
| basically impossible to secure that.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I suppose that was an intentional choice, I can imagine
| running the amount of worlds that GTA has (iirc you only
| have up to 32 or so players in a world? Something like
| that) doesn't scale well cost-wise. IDK if AWS and co
| were up for the task yet back when. But since you earn
| in-game currency, not having a central authority check
| these things is... an interesting choice.
|
| I suspect GTA VI may improve on these things and have
| centralised/dedicated/anti-cheat-guaranteed servers. Then
| again, it never impacted their profit margins so idk.
| arp242 wrote:
| It's impossible to prevent cheating from the server-side only.
| Something like an aimbot can operate purely on information you
| _need_ to have as a client (to render the other players on the
| screen), and still be a huge advantage because it can respond
| faster than any human can.
| baseballdork wrote:
| Shouldn't that be detectable?
| heromal wrote:
| Without kernel level anti cheat you can detect (some) other
| usermode cheats, but not kernel level cheats. With kernel
| level anticheat, you can detect the vast majority of other
| kernel level cheats. Vanguard is effective enough that most
| successful cheaters are using external devices and DMA to
| bypass the kernel altogether (or they just use Macs because
| Apple doesn't allow Vanguard). And despite Riot's
| insistence to the contrary, they have not "detected" DMA
| cheats.
| coretx wrote:
| Advanced DMA/IOMMU attacks are hard, soft and firmware
| specific. In order to detect it, you'll have to do a ton
| of very expensive work all the while you risk destroying
| the customers soft, firm and hardware. Good luck
| explaining the judge what you did.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It should be - if a server firehose streams all players'
| network data to an analysis thing, it should be able to
| detect patterns of impossible accuracy and response time,
| even though there is some margin for error due to e.g. lag
| and packet loss (iirc intentional lag / packet loss are
| some strategies cheaters use to obfuscate things like
| aimbots, e.g. generating movements that shoot someone in
| the head but holding them back for a second or so so that
| in theory a competent player could have done the required
| motions within a second instead of 1/100th thereof)
| intended wrote:
| Nope.
|
| Evolutionary pressures on cheaters drives them to get
| better.
|
| Eventually someone finds a stable chink in the server armor
| and it is exploited en masse.
|
| The goal is to make it inconvenient to cheat on average.
|
| There's probably some ratio of games with cheaters to games
| without cheaters that players can tolerate that governs
| this.
| gpderetta wrote:
| On the other hand an aimbot can operate purely on
| informations you /need/ to send in and out to the physical
| machine (input peripherals and the screen), so there's
| that...
| plopz wrote:
| I think server side statistical analysis can go a long way to
| detect stuff like that. Obviously its always a cat and mouse
| game between devs and cheaters, and there are always
| workarounds, but theres a lot more the devs could be doing
| without relying on invasive client side detection.
| evoke4908 wrote:
| I think the problem is that that kind of work requires a
| good deal of developer resources for a long time. What
| company wants to pay upkeep on a shipped product? You could
| save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by shipping a
| rootkit to players and not worrying about server security.
| vkazanov wrote:
| Any company that makes big money on long-living
| multiplayer games?
| phito wrote:
| It would not only take a lot of developer resources, but
| also computing power.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| I suppose Valve, who trained a neural network to
| detect/ban cheaters exhibiting unnatural behavior.
| babypuncher wrote:
| It hasn't paid off very much, CS2 still has a rampant
| cheating problem. VAC has been a joke for years at this
| point.
| nicce wrote:
| It only needs to be good enough that people keep buying
| (or not) the Prime when their old account gets banned.
| There is good reason that it exist, also from cheating
| perspective.
| lomase wrote:
| Because CS2 does not have Overwatch, the AI VAC thing. As
| far as I know is only enabled on Dota.
|
| VAC is a joke until they ban players and all start to cry
| on reddit/discord.
| butterfly42069 wrote:
| BasicallyHomeless did a recent YouTube video on this.
| emgeee wrote:
| I've always wondered about this too. It should be pretty
| easy to recognize statistical outliers. I'm sure cheaters
| would start to adapt but that adaptation might start to
| look more in-line with normal skill levels so at least the
| game wouldn't be utterly ruined
| alex_lav wrote:
| This post is so interesting because it highlights the
| people that don't know anything about the requirements or
| state of cheats/anticheat. What you're describing is 10
| years out of date. Every modern cheat has a toggle, and
| (almost) every modern cheater masks augmented behavior
| with misses/native behavior.
| lifeformed wrote:
| This thread is full of armchair developers who see a
| problem and immediately think, "Oh, it's easy, just do
| this simple thing I just thought of," as is there haven't
| been billions of dollars and decades of research spent on
| this problem.
| elashri wrote:
| According to the latest study [1] estimating how much
| money cheat developers make annually it is an upper limit
| of ~ $75M. I would say that the very liberal estimation
| of anti cheating efforts will cost maybe $100M annually.
| That does not include only research efforts but actual
| cost of tackle them (extra compute, reviewers...etc).
| This is unrealistic but even through to reach the point
| of billions (2-3 billions) you would say that Gaming
| companies were spending on average $100M since the
| beginning of personal computers era (on research only).
| This is not something that is hard to believe even with
| the most liberal interpretation.
|
| So I think it is fair to say the there haven't been
| billions of dollars of research spent on this problem.
|
| [1] https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/anti-cheat-study-
| reveals-chea...
| lifeformed wrote:
| That's only looking at western audiences. In 2020,
| Tencent said that the cheating market in China is worth
| $293M annually [1]. In China there are many individual
| games making billions in annual revenue. PUBG bans over a
| hundred thousand cheaters every week. I don't think
| adding up to billions is too farfetched, if you count
| globally over the decades, although it'd be close.
|
| There are also the costs of the opportunities that
| cheating prevents from happening. Development would be
| much faster and more types of games could be made.
|
| [1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/apps-
| social/article/3099893/chinas...
| elashri wrote:
| Thanks for bringing that up to me. I did not include the
| largest gaming market and it seems more plausible now
| this the OP estimations make sense.
|
| Edit: I missed that you are the same commenter that I
| replied. sorry about that
| babypuncher wrote:
| The problem is that most cheaters don't just go full
| aimbot and track people through walls. That is a surefire
| way to make sure your account gets reported, reviewed,
| and banned regardless of what anti-cheat is in place.
|
| Serial cheaters cheat just enough to give themselves an
| edge without making it obvious to the people watching
| them. By just looking at their stats, it can become very
| difficult (though not impossible) to differentiate a
| cheater from a pro player. This difficulty increases the
| odds of getting a false positive, necessitating a higher
| detection threshhold to avoid banning innocent players.
| nicce wrote:
| Valve has adapted this kind of thing in Counter Strike
| for almost a decade.
|
| They try to make own matchmaking for possible statistical
| outliers so cheaters end up playing against each other.
| Of course, real good players can still get there and
| there are (at least used to) real humans on reviewing on
| those games to see if someone is actually a cheater. It
| is not a simple task, since you can cheat to be just
| slightly better than others and that is enough to be
| good.
| lifeformed wrote:
| Good players are statistical outliers. False positives
| are hard to avoid with this kind of approach.
| arp242 wrote:
| You can tune the aimbot to be as good as the server allows,
| maybe with a bit of variation to throw it off.
|
| And realistically, some real non-cheating players will by
| chance just have similar statistics to bots, especially
| since the bots will start doing their best to mimic real
| players.
|
| Also many players don't need to cheat all the time; just in
| that critical moment when it really matters. Didn't Magnus
| Carlsen say he only needs a single move from a chess
| computer in the right moment to be virtually guaranteed
| win? Something like that probably applies to a many people
| and fields. This is even harder to detect with just
| statistics.
|
| Also also reminds me of the "you can't respond in less than
| 100ms, and if start the sprint faster than that after the
| starting pistol then you're disqualified"-type stuff they
| have in the Olympics - some people _can_ consistently
| respond faster and there 's a bunch of false positives. Not
| great.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| > Also many players don't need to cheat all the time;
| just in that critical moment when it really matters.
| Didn't Magnus Carlsen say he only needs a single move
| from a chess computer in the right moment to be virtually
| guaranteed win? Something like that probably applies to a
| many people and fields. This is even harder to detect
| with just statistics.
|
| The difference is that IRL chess and a typical FPS game
| have very different availability of datasets. IRL chess
| has both fewer moves per game, and fewer games played in
| short succession than typical FPS games. Also, with FPS
| games there is a single metric to evaluate -- the shot
| landed or missed -- compared with chess where moves are
| ranked on a scale.
|
| So I'd argue that it would be much easier to do a
| statistical model to predict a cheating aimbot than it
| would a cheating IRL chess player. I don't believe
| Magnus's proposition holds for prolific online chess
| players when they do dozens or more blitz/bullet games in
| a single day.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _Didn 't Magnus Carlsen say he only needs a single move
| from a chess computer in the right moment to be virtually
| guaranteed win?_
|
| That's because he's an elite chess player. Him cheating
| once per game could make the difference between being
| number 1 or number 10 but either way he's up there.
|
| But for you or me, cheating once per game wouldn't make a
| difference. We'd still be ranked as nobody plebs. To get
| ranked high enough for people to know our names we would
| have to cheat dozens of times a game, and experienced
| players would easily peg us as cheaters.
|
| Try cheating on chess.com, if you cheat enough to make a
| meaningful difference their servers will _automatically_
| nail you with statistics.
| shultays wrote:
| Didn't Magnus Carlsen say he only needs a single move
| from a chess computer in the right moment to be virtually
| guaranteed win
|
| If we are thinking of the same quote, iirc he said all he
| needs is a prompt from computer "there is a winning move
| here"
| arp242 wrote:
| Yeah, maybe - don't recall the precise quote off-hand.
| But the gist of it was "I need very little help from a
| chess computer to have a huge advantage".
| LinXitoW wrote:
| Is the main problem with cheaters that it's unfair, or
| that it feels unfair/ruins the experience?
|
| Because if you force all the cheaters to hide well enough
| to look like "normal" players, no one will know, and the
| game feel will not be negatively impacted. Outside of the
| tippy top of competition where money becomes involved,
| it's kind of irrelevant if the game is technically fair,
| as long as it feels fair to everyone.
| stevemk14ebr wrote:
| My human aimbot evaded fairfight for years
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVdaf6CkqL8
| darknavi wrote:
| Client <-> Server architecture can still take you a long way.
| Culling what you send to the client and relying less on
| client-side "hiding" of state, server authoritative actions
| with client-side prediction, etc.
|
| At the end of the day someone could be using hardware
| "cheats" but you can get down to a pretty good spot to stop
| or disincentivize cheaters without running rootkits on their
| devices.
| Rohansi wrote:
| Latency significantly reduces the effectiveness of culling
| via the server. There will always be a place for client
| side anti-cheat if games are running on players' computers.
| nicce wrote:
| Funnily, for example, using GeForce Now prevents almost
| all kind of cheats. Maybe the future of the competitive
| gaming is that you only use remote client for remote
| server which is hosted by the game company.
| Rohansi wrote:
| Yes, but even some cheats are possible through streaming.
| Basic things like scripted no-recoil all the way to
| aimbots based on image recognition. People are even using
| AI to recognize and highlight players on your screen -
| and even some built into monitors!
| anonymousab wrote:
| There are hardware cheating setups that utilize an
| external camera+device with basic image recognition and
| spoof a normal mouse over USB. From software's
| perspective, all you see on the client side is normal
| mouse inputs from a Logitech or razer mouse.
|
| At the very least, this is less capable than wallhacks
| from reading memory.
| nicce wrote:
| Yes, it is true that you can use optics still, but
| everything memory related is always much more effective
| and can completely prevented. No need to use rootkits.
|
| I would say that it takes few years still before people
| have good enough hardware before AI can be used in real-
| time. You can use OpenCV and train things against
| specific game to get a decent performance with image
| recognition, but it is not that reliable.
| arp242 wrote:
| You don't need a "hardware cheat"; just a program that
| reads the memory representation of stuff. This is nothing
| new and already how many cheating tools work, and is
| exactly what all these anti-cheating things are designed to
| prevent.
| lomase wrote:
| If you try to read memory nowdays the naive way, with
| cheatengine for exaple, you will get banned in any online
| videogame.
| anonymousab wrote:
| Even having CE installed on your machine - or software
| like IDA or Olly back in the day - is enough for some
| games to immediately permaban you. In some cases, having
| virtualization enabled and having VM software on disk
| (VMware, wsl2, etc.) can trip up some anticheats.
|
| The average player isn't a developer and doesn't need
| such things, so some game devs defer to the side of
| caution. The false positives are a miniscule and
| acceptable fraction of players.
| nickphx wrote:
| if you have a large enough player base to sample, you can
| determine who is cheating with math. EA Fairplay is pretty
| good.. Steam's VAC is good, and not some kernel level
| nonsense..
| heromal wrote:
| VAC is absolutely terrible, are you kidding? You have to
| rage to get VAC banned.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| False positives with no process for recourse and nice
| perfect fingerprinting to prevent ban evasion is better?
|
| I think they intentionally have the knob turned all the
| way up to 0.1 initially, for PR and lube reasons.
| Rohansi wrote:
| To some degree, yes. But there are actually many cheaters
| that intentionally don't play perfectly to avoid detection.
| That way they appear higher skilled but still within human
| range.
| jsheard wrote:
| VAC is so not-good that there are not one but _two_ popular
| third-party matchmaking services for Valves games whose
| main selling point is much stronger (read: more invasive)
| anti-cheat than VAC, and one of them even charges a
| subscription to play, which highly skilled players gladly
| pay to get away from the cheaters in high-rank VAC servers.
|
| https://play.esea.net / https://www.faceit.com
| zamalek wrote:
| There is a startup attempting to use ML to find cheaters:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkmIItTrQP4 (this video might
| be overly optimistic) - https://anybrain.gg
|
| They even _claim_ to be able to fingerprint players according
| their playstyle, thwarting all methods of ban evasion.
| Skepticism should be abundant here, but this one of the
| oldest tricks in ML: categorization /clustering. I'm
| cautiously hopeful.
|
| This would be server-side by nature.
| akira2501 wrote:
| It makes it way easier to detect it. If a player can pre move
| their aim to be at the point near where the aimbot would take
| it by using a wallhack they can hide the action much more
| clearly. If they're constantly doing 180 no scopes you've got
| a pretty good indication something is wrong.
|
| Also if your guns aren't _perfectly_ accurate then the aimbot
| can't actually predict much of anything.
| hypeatei wrote:
| What? The current PC gaming model where things run on a machine
| controlled by the user is fundamentally against solving the
| issue of cheats. You can't prevent everything server-side.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| It's not about prevention, but detection.
| cobalt wrote:
| and it is a cat and mouse game between cheat and game devs
| hypeatei wrote:
| I'm not sure what point you're trying to make but in this
| context there is no difference. If you know someone is
| cheating, you prevent further cheating by banning them.
|
| Now I'll ask: how do you detect someone wall hacking
| automatically? No human review and no false flags. Go!
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| A prevention model would be like the xbox where technical
| measures are used to prevent user code. A detection model
| is server side and detects anomalies for bans.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > If you know someone is cheating, you prevent further
| cheating by banning them.
|
| If you think it's _statistically likely_ that someone
| _might_ be cheating, but you 're not sure, you can
| matchmake them with other people who might be cheating.
| hypeatei wrote:
| That seems flawed as you would punish people who are
| playing well. Statistics are great, but you'd inevitably
| match legitimate players with misfits, ruining their
| experience.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > how do you detect someone wall hacking automatically?
|
| You don't tell the client the location of anything they
| can't see.
| babypuncher wrote:
| This doesn't work well in real time games. The client
| needs to know another player is on the other side of that
| wall so it can
|
| * Play sounds from their actions * Actually be able to
| render them when either player comes around the corner
| without them obviously materializing out of thin air.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Far easier said than done
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Not our problem.
|
| The problem of cheating in games does not weigh more than the
| users ultimate ownership of and control over their own
| property.
|
| No one has a right to a business model.
|
| They can do plenty enough server-side. It's not a blocking
| problem at all, it's just _easier_ to take over all control
| of the users pc for your own convenience.
|
| Everything, including all valid goals, is easier if you could
| just have the power to control whatever you want instead of
| having to cooperate and respect others and respect
| boundaries. It's no more valid than saying "Everything would
| be so much better if everyone would just do what I say.".
| Using that argument is invalid even if supposedly applied in
| service to some otherwise valid goal.
| babypuncher wrote:
| If a game is overrun with cheaters, people will not play
| it. You're basically arguing that whole genres of games
| should cease to exist.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I'm saying no such thing. I'm saying that that wrong is
| no excuse for the other wrong.
|
| There are infinite ways to attack any problem, and it's
| not a requirement but a choice to persue only certain
| ideas vs others.
|
| For instance, these approaches are based on removing
| agency from all users for the supposed goal of dealing
| with the bad users.
|
| But there is no law of physics that says that is the only
| way to do that.
|
| You could go the opposite direction and empower all users
| to deal with bad actors themselves just like in real life
| where anbasshole simply gets avoided or punched in the
| nose, which works by the simple math that the bad actors
| are outnumbered by everyone else. They still always exist
| but they are relegated to operating in the corners and
| shadows.
|
| But their low level presence is a fact of life no matter
| what. Oppressive regimes don't get rid of them either.
| The sales pitch is we'll protect you but in fact they
| don't any better than you could have yoirself.
|
| A company that has an easier option and has no other
| value meter than money divorced from any consideration of
| how it is attained, simply has no incentive to bother
| doing anything but the easiest thing. That's the only
| reason they want the keys to your house, because you
| stupidly give them, not because they need them or have
| the tiniest right to demand them to protect their
| entertainment business.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| We have a working solution that some games still use,
| dedicated servers with admins that can investigate and
| ban people themselves. Has its own suite of problems but
| it works well against cheaters.
|
| But skill based matchmaking type games where you're
| matched with random people is fundamentally incompatible
| with this model, that is why the person you responded to
| you said that you're suggesting that these games should
| cease to exist.
| tzs wrote:
| > Not our problem
|
| It is if you want to be allowed to play with other people
| because...
|
| > The problem of cheating in games does not weigh more than
| the users ultimate ownership of and control over their own
| property
|
| ...when you play a multiplayer game what happens on _your_
| property affects what happens on the property of the
| _other_ players and often also on the property of the game
| company. If you want to be allowed to do that you might
| have to agree to do some things on your property because...
|
| > No one has a right to a business model
|
| ...no one has a right to play any particular multiplayer
| game.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| > The problem of cheating in games does not weigh more than
| the users ultimate ownership of and control over their own
| property.
|
| What the users want to use their ultimate ownership and
| control over their own property for is preventing cheating.
|
| It's not like Riot is forcing this on people against their
| will, people just don't like playing against cheaters.
|
| The only place I ever hear complaints about kernel anti
| cheats are people complaining because they want to use
| Linux and it isn't supported or forums like Hacker News,
| where people paradoxically care so much about peoples
| computing rights that they are perfectly happy to limit
| what gamers are allowed to do with their computers.
| kelnos wrote:
| What a bizarre take. If people consent to installing these
| invasive anti-cheat systems, then it doesn't matter if
| anyone has a "right" to a business model or not; in that
| case their business model is _working_.
|
| > _They can do plenty enough server-side._
|
| No, they can't. The amount of responses in these threads by
| people who have no idea what they're talking about is...
| well, probably not surprising, unfortunately.
|
| This is the same (correct) argument against the
| effectiveness of DRM: if you put things in the hands of a
| user and client you don't control, then it is a cat-and-
| mouse game to try to maintain control of those things.
|
| Sure, a naive cheat program of 20 years ago will today
| obviously look like a cheater. But if you have a cheat that
| statistically makes you look like a skilled non-cheating
| player (these things exist today!), the server isn't going
| to be able to catch you.
|
| I'm not saying that _justifies_ letting another party
| install what is effectively a rootkit on your hardware. I
| personally won 't do it; I just live without games that
| require it, and that's fine. Maybe there _is_ some middle
| ground where some form of client-side anti-cheat can
| reliably run without kernel-level permissions. But it 's a
| lazy, ignorant argument to just say that game companies
| haven't come up with it yet because it's "easier" to write
| a kernel-level system.
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| DRM is often removed after a little while since it is
| meant to delay the cracking at launch, where most people
| are going to buy. Anticheat is not.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| DRM does not help me, the honest buyer, to enjoy the
| game. Anticheat helps me, the honest buyer, to enjoy the
| game.
|
| Would I prefer a world where kernel-space anticheat is
| not needed for the games I like to play? Yes. Is that
| realistic? Probably no.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I think you merely lack imagination and are simply not
| the one to ask to work on the problem. I don't speak from
| ignorance.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| The bizarre take is granting a shred of validity to
| anyone who says "I need the keys to your house and bank
| account and a webcam in your bath room to protect the
| marketable value of my game service so that other platers
| will rent server access from me."
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Not all types of games require this kind of anticheat.
| But this competitive type like CS/Valorant/MOBA games
| that use skill based matchmaking and rankings does
| require something that approaches fair play to even work
| as a produc. So the user must make some sacrifices to get
| there due how open and easy it is to manipulate things on
| x86/Windows for the PCs administrator.
|
| Would it be reasonable to only sell this kind of game on
| console like hardware? Sure, but people have and use PCs
| and will have to make this choice themselves. And its not
| like user space software is not bad for privacy as any
| process your user runs can read all your files and even
| memory of other processes.
| kuschku wrote:
| > . But if you have a cheat that statistically makes you
| look like a skilled non-cheating player (these things
| exist today!)
|
| Then we've achieved our goal.
|
| https://xkcd.com/810/
| hypeatei wrote:
| I'm not advocating for taking away users rights, just
| pointing out that the current model doesn't really jive
| with the desire to stop cheaters. This is going to be a
| never ending cat & mouse game.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I basically agree with this. Which is why I run a Linux box
| for gaming, and why I don't play games that have this
| problem.
|
| I used to play Quake-likes, and there are people who are
| just that good out there, but it assuages the ego so much
| more to call them cheaters. I saw this _all the time_ on CS
| - as soon as someone even halfway good joined, everyone
| called them a cheater and the game dissolved. I eventually
| realised that this is not an anti-cheating problem, but a
| community /personality problem with the people that like
| playing these games. So I stopped.
| veunes wrote:
| It could eliminate a lot of these issues theoretically
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I built a dedicated gaming PC a couple of years ago. Too much
| cowboy coding in the industry for me to feel safe running this
| code on my main computer. Even games for which I pay have
| supposedly* been scanning/uploading personal data presumably for
| some adtech purposes.
|
| Why should I ever trust a gaming company to take security
| seriously? There was a story a few years ago about how one guy at
| home debugged GTA5's atrocious loading times without any
| resources. Loading times which were notoriously bad and surely
| had a negative impact on revenue, yet nobody in the company could
| be bothered.
|
| *Never verified it, but I recall the new owners of Kernel Space
| Program were accused of reporting personal data files to the
| cloud.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Oh yeah, that was down to a huge JSON file / slow JSON parser
| or something wasn't it? That was so bad.
| tpxl wrote:
| They wrote their own json parser which used strlen() all over
| the place, which is O(n), resulting in O(n^2) complexity for
| json parsing. The guy shimmed the function to return a cached
| response if it was called with the same string consecutively,
| which it was for parsing the JSON. The JSON contained the
| items in the real-money store btw.
| consteval wrote:
| Why would anyone ever write their own JSON parser? There're
| countless libs available that are hyper-optimized.
| mattigames wrote:
| I still hope someday the European Union forces Steam to allow
| transferring of games "owned", even if it's time-restricted (e.g.
| can't transfer the same game twice in a month)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Oh yeah, they did rule that you were legally allowed to
| transfer / resell digital games... but not that Steam & co had
| to offer the option.
| dark-star wrote:
| ...but you don't buy the game anymore, you acquire a license
| for using (playing) it.
|
| If you want games that you can re-sell, you will have to keep
| buying them on physical media (or on appstores that don't have
| DRM like GOG)
| mattigames wrote:
| I know, that's why I added quotes around "owned", so in other
| words what I meant is that the EU should force Steam to
| create the option to transfer that license among its own
| users.
| dark-star wrote:
| Yeah but I can just assume that this would also apply to
| e.g. Microsoft Windows licenses, and that Microsoft lobbies
| strongly against such a law (also every other vendor who
| locks software licenses to a particular end-user or
| licensee)
|
| Note that I wouldn't very much welcome such a law but I
| wouldn't bet on it happening any time soon
| tpxl wrote:
| You can, and people do, resell Windows licenses in
| Europe. Microsoft seethes about it, but can go fuck
| itself, because this is legal.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Do kernel-level anti-cheat measures even work if I'm running
| Steam as a Flatpak + Using the game under Proton? I (naively,
| perhaps) assumed the security sandboxing model of flatpak would
| restrict that level of access.
| LelouBil wrote:
| Does any Linux kernel level anti cheat exists ?
|
| If you're running under proton, it can't work. Proton/wine are
| not virtualizing a windows kernel, they are intercepting
| syscalls/library calls and running the equivalent linux code.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| Some anti-cheat has clients for Linux (the ones that don't
| generally just disallow playing on Proton). I don't think the
| Linux ones are kernel level but don't quote me on that.
| butterfly42069 wrote:
| The biggest giveaway the kernel level anti cheat is stupid is
| that Easy Anti-Cheat works on Linux without kernel level access.
| jsheard wrote:
| It only works on Linux if the developer allows it, because it's
| not nearly as effective on Linux. Rust (the game not the
| language) uses EAC but doesn't run on Linux by choice for
| example. Neither does Fortnite. Apex Legends uses EAC and does
| run on Linux, and now nearly every public cheat for that game
| targets the Linux version because it's such a soft target.
|
| I don't really like the status quo of installing random kernel-
| mode crap either, but nobody has a compelling answer for how to
| not make cheating absolutely trivial without it. Usermode
| anticheat barely does anything, serverside anticheat can only
| do so much, and the only other alternative is switching to
| console platforms which prevent cheating by giving the user
| zero freedom.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| > game targets the Linux version because it's such a soft
| target.
|
| I was going to say games on Linux should require secure boot
| so cheat kernels and modules can't run, but then the kernel
| could just lie about it being enabled.
| jsheard wrote:
| Most Linux cheats don't even bother with kernel modules, a
| process running as root can read and write arbitrary memory
| in the game process without an unprivileged usermode
| anticheat having any way to know it's happening. It's
| embarrassingly easy compared to the hoops you have to jump
| through to _maybe_ avoid detection on Windows.
| sunshowers wrote:
| Right, provenance is an issue.
|
| I suspect the only way that might balance everyone's
| interests would be to set up a separate OS installation for
| competitive games. This could be done via bare-metal dual
| boot, via a hypervisor, or just by having a completely
| different computer for playing games on (what I have). At
| least in that world you still have a lot more freedom than
| you do on console, such as the ability to mod games that
| don't need anti-cheat (which is almost all of them).
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| Still wondering what kinda special sauce that Blizzard is
| using in Overwatch. In my literal thousands of hours of
| playtime I encountered so few blatant cheaters its probably
| still in the double digit. Are there probably a good amount
| of cheaters I didn't realize were cheaters? probably, but
| does it really matter if you don't realize they are cheating?
| trissylegs wrote:
| PirateSoftware on twitch/youtube talks about his time at
| blizzard working on catching cheaters in WoW. Their methods
| are usually about figuring out how they're cheating and
| what behaviors cheaters follow.
|
| Before overwatch they had years of experience catching
| cheaters in wow.
| jolmg wrote:
| I've never seen a game request root privileges, and I would think
| installation of anything kernel-level would need that. None of
| the steam binaries have setuid nor capabilities set.
|
| Have anyone seen games that request root privileges?
|
| EDIT: I'm gathering from this[1] and the fact that no wine-
| related package have kernel modules included and no executable
| from any of those packages have setuid nor capabilities set, that
| this isn't really a problem in Linux, just in Windows.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/gjzkzk/will_w...
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| Everything says "wants to make changes to your device". I
| accidentally installed EAC that way.
| keyringlight wrote:
| It's worth noting that when you first install it, steam asks
| to install a service to assist with its duties, presumably
| for most install tasks. Steam has been around long enough and
| that service is now trouble free that it became part of the
| furniture most ignore as part of the background. That's aside
| from how users may be trained to hit 'yes' on any permission
| box that comes up to swat it away and play the game.
| jsheard wrote:
| > It's worth noting that when you first install it, steam
| asks to install a service to assist with its duties,
| presumably for most install tasks.
|
| They do this because Steam was originally designed in the
| XP era when you could write whatever you want to Program
| Files without escalating to admin, and instead of
| refactoring where they put their files when Vista made the
| permissions more strict they started installing that
| backdoor service which lets them keep putting everything in
| Program Files without triggering UAC prompts all the time.
| It's a pretty gross and unnecessary hack, but I doubt
| they're ever going to fix it at this point.
| sunshowers wrote:
| I don't think this is why -- Steam actually sets
| permissions on its subdirectory so that any user can
| write to it. (This means that while installing mods, for
| example, I can write to that directory without having to
| deal with UAC/sudo.)
| keyringlight wrote:
| Although I'm not fully linux knowledgeable, I think they
| put everything under the user profile in
| ~/.local/share/Steam for similar reasons so they can do
| software installs with no elevations. They're not the
| only ones taking that approach though, it's become common
| across OSes to offer an easy/quick installer that dumps
| itself in your user profile because that's seems to
| matter most to getting users up and running.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The kernel level anticheats are almost always written for
| Windows. They are relevant to gaming on Linux because those
| games won't work on Linux even if wine/proton run the user
| space portions fine
| bjackman wrote:
| Not on Linux. Things are different on Windows, especially if
| you wanna play competitive games, I'm told.
| a2128 wrote:
| From my understanding, if you play an EAC game on Linux with
| Proton, you're not really running the same EAC as Windows
| players. You're running a lite version that runs as a regular
| user and it tries to provide at least some level of protection
| like verifying game files or detecting anything clearly out of
| place that it can detect, but obviously it doesn't have the
| permissions to see everything running on your system or install
| a kernel module. This does mean cheaters could probably just
| cheat on Linux to bypass it more easily, so anticheats like EAC
| will put Linux support as an opt-in toggle which some
| developers choose not to enable.
| Topfi wrote:
| Does anyone know whether disclosure of Denuvo and similarly
| controversial "add-ons" does negatively affect sales? Maybe I am
| cynical, but I have come to the conclusion that whether it is
| always online DRM, rootkit-level anti-cheat or the need to have
| an account for offline play, community anger is often only
| maintained when a game had other things going against it from the
| get-go. Not against disclosing this of course, that is a great
| move for those who actually are willing to walk-the-walk, just
| asking whether we should perhaps temper our expectations on the
| impact of such a measure.
| dmonitor wrote:
| The most recent study I saw showed that Denuvo significantly
| helps revenue capture within the first few months of a game's
| release
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759...
| grayhatter wrote:
| I can't figure out what that article is trying to prove.
| "When DRM remains uncracked, we can't detect any losses due
| to piracy." well duh. Does it otherwise effect sales? Do any
| small games use it, or just large studios?
| righthand wrote:
| FYI - Denuvo paid for that study.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Good. I absolutely refuse to compromise my system by using these
| things. Games should be required to let people know what they are
| signing up for.
|
| And if that means more companies choose to avoid kernel anti-
| cheat, so much the better. I'm still mad that I can't play
| Helldivers 2 - a freaking co-op game where cheaters can't pose a
| problem - because of this nonsense.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > a freaking co-op game where cheaters can't pose a problem
|
| Winning doesn't give you any permanent rewards?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Why would that matter? If someone gets rewards that they
| didn't earn, it doesn't negatively impact anyone else.
| pjmlp wrote:
| This is very much welcomed.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I think the population of game developers and their knowledge of
| multiplayer networking is fundamentally getting worse over time,
| because I see things that should not be architecturally possible
| in a lot of newer multiplayer games.
|
| This whole thing anti-cheat thing is just a separate problem
| entirely, but it's so painfully exacerbated by the first.
| juunpp wrote:
| The anti-cheat also goes hand in hand with the predatory
| business models of "always online" and micro transactions.
| Those things sell because of advantage over other players or
| just social factors in the case of cosmetics. Wouldn't be as
| relevant in an offline game. But now, since the game is online
| (for business, not technical, reasons), we need some way to
| keep everyone honest.
|
| I'm just hoping this entire business model dies, along with the
| anti-cheat and everything else with it.
| janderland wrote:
| Strange take. These things are being put forward by major
| companies who hire very good engineers. Riot Games makes the
| most popular game in the entire world (League of Legends) and
| they use kernel-level anti-cheating. I interviewed with them
| and found their test to be one of the more difficult ones I've
| taken. I'm not under the impression they lack the necessary
| knowledge.
| tightbookkeeper wrote:
| Poor networking -> need for anti-cheat
|
| Does not mean:
|
| Using anti-cheat -> poor networking
|
| Ops comment is absolutely true. Engineers in games who are
| good have high incentive to 5x their salary and lifestyle by
| doing anything else.
|
| This was not true in 1997. The industry also just attracts a
| different crowd, more adjacent to film and entertainment than
| it used to.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Your interview experience at one company isn't representative
| of the entire industry.
| a2128 wrote:
| I definitely think it's just a business decision being made in
| some cases.
|
| Your developers have just built and demonstrated a functioning
| multiplayer prototype. They want to spend 3 months to rewrite
| some of it for better security, and 3 months to implement the
| missing features and make it fully functioning. You just got
| off a call from a sales person for an anticheat vendor who gave
| you a strong pitch, so you say no to the first 3 months because
| it's cheaper to just add anticheat than to pay 3 months of
| salary on this.
| bastard_op wrote:
| The problem is since Valve and Proton made windows games viable
| for Linux and the Steam Deck, most of that anti-cheat vermin does
| NOT work under Linux. Even if it did, if you run Linux, you
| likely take some objection to someone wanting to add kernel
| modules of unknown and/or ill repute to your pretty open-source
| kernel.
|
| Valve knows this, kernel-level anti-cheat is simply not practical
| for use with Linux as a consideration. Most game companies care
| zero for Linux in the first place, which means for us, we just
| end up inadvertently boycotting those games and bad-mouthing them
| regardless, but hey, it's only 1%.
| lomase wrote:
| I think the end goal of Valve is to support anticheats in
| Linux. But they want the Kernel to provide an API for it, so
| you don't need to run the anticheat like a driver.
| bastard_op wrote:
| But will a canned, defined api ever be good enough? As soon
| as someone paints a border, someone will step over it. It's
| the reason security products in windoze as well as anti-
| cheats require kernel-level access, and why outages like the
| crowdstrike one a few months ago occur and why microsoft lets
| it (for now).
|
| It's an arms race, and no api will ever be good enough to
| keep a miscreant from working against logical choices. If I
| have to play a game that I have to assume someone is
| cheating, I really don't want to play that game, or at least
| with others of dubious reputation. This is why I run my own
| server for games I like to play with others I trust.
|
| If someone wants to play competitively publicly with anti-
| cheats, they should opt-in to do so, but I'd like the option
| to not, and simply play local or private instances with my
| own general TOS. If diplomacy fails, a ban option for the
| server.
| Jnr wrote:
| 1.9% already :)
| supportengineer wrote:
| Not a gamer - Is Steam basically a package manager like 'yum' or
| 'brew', but for games?
| dark-star wrote:
| more like an app store
| Jnr wrote:
| Yes, and also a store and a community platform.
| PeakKS wrote:
| More like flatpak/flathub since it has it's own runtime, with
| the addition of community features and purchasing.
| ranger207 wrote:
| Similar to Google Play with Google Play Services: both an app
| store and a set of services for games to use
| ukd1 wrote:
| Yes; but more like the apple App Store - they take a cut, and
| (to some/varying extent) try to ensure some level of legitimacy
| / quality.
| sunshowers wrote:
| Like 10% of Steam is yum/brew. The other 90% is:
|
| * GUI
|
| * managing installations, including things like Proton to run
| Win32 games on Linux, and Fossilize to precompile shaders
|
| * bandwidth-saving stuff like being able to transfer games
| locally
|
| * being able to play remotely in a variety of configurations:
| LAN, WAN, or having a friend connect to your local session
| ("Remote Play Together")
|
| * pretty good support for mapping any controller you have to
| any controller inputs a game wants
|
| * cloud saves
|
| * a bunch of community features like forums and broadcasting
|
| * family sharing
|
| * a VR runtime
|
| * marketing for devs (regular sales, algorithmic
| recommendations etc)
|
| * an API for devs with various services
|
| * the backend infrastructure for all of the above
|
| It's been around for a long time so it's quite feature-rich at
| this point. Lots of things that generally make sense to have.
| m463 wrote:
| and telemetry
| red_admiral wrote:
| More like an app store, which is really just a
| GUI/payments/licence layer on top of a package manager.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| I hate to say this but a large percentage (in fact, I believe a
| majority) of gamers simply do not care about invasive anti-
| cheats. Right now CounterStrike players are mostly begging Valve
| for kernel-level anti-cheat since their current solution isn't
| working at all. If anything, this warning will actually make many
| player's _more_ impressed with the game. That said, more consumer
| information is almost always better in any case, especially in
| this case considering that this is not a requirement of law but
| of a private company.
| logical_person wrote:
| Prop 65 went great! Let's get a warning out for every game with
| peer to peer networking while we're at it.
| byteknight wrote:
| I get the argument, but if that is more than a strawman
| argument to you, I am bewildered. Making a network connection
| is infinitely less problematic than having root level access
| to a kernel (translate to windows language for NT)
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Prop 65 went great!
|
| The secondary effect is that business will stop using
| processes and chemicals which require them to carry this
| warning. You've effectively created a new market segment.
|
| Are the labels annoying to the point of comedy? Sure, but
| it's not /your/ behavior we were trying to modify.
| Matheus28 wrote:
| Seeing the warning everywhere has mostly desensitized
| people to it, which makes it ineffective.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Doesn't matter in a world of AI powered hacks. Kernel level
| anti cheat isn't detecting the yolov8 model fine tuned on the
| head of my enemies.
| ok_dad wrote:
| This video suggests you can catch this type of cheater
| without even a kernel level anti cheat:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=x-EbjGSRyKA
|
| There's a lot of other stuff in the video but if you skip the
| robot building parts at the beginning he talks about an anti
| cheat system he developed with another person.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Behavioral analysis (the thing he's talking about) doesn't
| work that well and has a hard precision limit due to the
| nature of online gaming. What the player sees, what the
| server sees, and what other players see are entirely
| different things. I'm not even talking about plausibly
| deniable things like visual sound location.
|
| Nobody's using complicated stuff like this in practice
| though, as there are easier methods. But of course this
| path can be taken, and it's not possible to block easily.
| mmis1000 wrote:
| it's not always easy to tell if it's just a player
| playing weirdly or a mistuned AI though. Maybe the player
| just have too low mouse sensitivity so it is always a
| little lagged, maybe it's actualy AI. There is no easy
| way to tell, and require manual judgement in a lot of
| cases.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Aimmy is still undetected everywhere except overwatch last
| I checked:
|
| https://github.com/Babyhamsta/Aimmy
|
| And it's likely that most detection systems can be
| trivially fooled by me ChatGPTing the code around the way
| mouse movements are implemented to act slightly different /
| use a different compiler or something to get different file
| hashes on the core tool.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| You don't need kernel-level cheats to bypass VAC, nor kernel
| level anti-cheats to catch cheaters.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| >nor kernel level anti-cheats to catch cheaters.
|
| Do you have some examples of good anti-cheats that are not
| kernel-level? Do you have any that are as good as Riot's
| Vanguard? I'd prefer examples of FPS games since these are
| the most mechanically skill based compared to other genres
| that have more strategy, but would like to hear any examples
| you are thinking of. Lastly, if you say server-side, that may
| work, but many companies don't seem interested in it due to
| the cost, at least IIUC.
| flessner wrote:
| As someone that plays CS2 and Valorant regularly...
|
| Vanguard hasn't been effective for a while now. The
| cheating situation is a lot worse than CS in my experience,
| but every discussion gets shutdown because... well... it's
| Vanguard.
|
| With CS2 I have talked to many players about this and
| everyone says the same thing: "There's a very noticeable
| decline in cheaters above 10k Elo."... personally I have
| pushed beyond 15k and briefly above 20k Elo and the amount
| of cheaters have steadily declined (although less obvious
| cheats, eg. wallhack, are probably more common at that
| level) - for Valorant it has pretty much stayed at a
| constant amount of "cheatiness" across the ranks.
|
| CS actually has a rich history of features, functions,
| services?... that aren't strictly anti-cheat...
|
| Overwatch gave players the option to "police" others
| players replays - this wasn't only against cheating, but
| also griefing.
|
| Prime? Is it still even a thing? It was great when CSGO
| went F2P... all the cheaters just annoyed the non-prime
| players (F2P).
|
| The ominous Trust factor which is probably the single most
| effective piece in making my personal experience great. But
| there's no real way to tell?
|
| Also, VacNet - which is running? is AI based? banning
| players? lowering their trust factor?... with Valve there's
| no real way to tell most of the time, but it's probably
| existent in some shape, way or form.
|
| Not to say that CS2 has solved cheating, it's far from it -
| but neither has Valorant.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| I have a _very_ hard time believing that the rate of
| cheaters _go down_ in high elo. IIRC the new CS2
| leaderboard still regularly features cheat companies on
| it (eg. config by [cheat dev] as the leaderboard name.) I
| myself do not have any data to back up that claim, but
| yours completely goes against what I have experienced.
|
| I think the point about wallhack being more common in
| higher elo is more likely. I would add that some forms of
| trigger botting and recoil control cheats are actually
| more difficult to tell than wallhacking. Spinbotters
| don't get very high elo because they get mass reported
| because of how blatant they are, likely not due to VAC. I
| would need some real evidence to believe that claim
| (although as I said I similarly have no evidence myself
| to convince you to accept my claim).
|
| One thing I _can_ say is that I do frequently meet
| cheaters in CS these days, and the issue has gotten so
| bad in my experience that many cheaters even announce at
| the start of the game that they eg. have wallhack. Or one
| team member will turn on cheats if a game is getting
| close towards the end of the game. Also, the main reason
| FACEIT exists is for its anti-cheat, and on FACEIT there
| are almost no reports of cheating, and it 's a big deal
| when it happens. If VAC was really working now we would
| see more people leaving FACEIT. I must ask when you
| started playing CS? Because the only way your post makes
| sense to me is if you started playing around the time
| when CS2 came out, which indeed did have more cheaters
| then it does now, but that was truly an exceptional level
| of cheating and I don't think that is a fair point of
| comparison, especially as a comparison to Vanguard.
|
| I admit to taking claims about Vanguard at face value and
| I've never played Valorant (in part due to Vanguard, as I
| don't want to install a rootkit). But what you say about
| Vanguard also completely goes against what I have heard
| about it.
| Vilian wrote:
| You don't have replay in valorant, you can't be sure if
| the other player was cheating or not, in CS you can
| flessner wrote:
| I absolutely support your claims about the leaderboards,
| it's an obvious show of cheating in CS2. There's also a
| strong incentive for cheating companies to be there so it
| might not be descriptive of the _average_ experience.
| However, I can 't speak for that level as my peak was
| barely over 25k (top 1%?) and the leaderboards are simply
| orders of magnitude away from that.
|
| Regarding cheaters announcing they're cheating - I
| haven't encountered that in a long time, but I have heard
| of it often enough from new players... so it might be an
| issue with trust factor, but who knows?
|
| I have actually been playing CS off and on since around
| 2017 - at least in my experience the current cheating
| situation isn't worse than it was back then, but it's
| also not better. The only time it was meaningfully better
| was when prime released around 2021.
|
| However, it's also true that I started playing more after
| the release of CS2... and the aforementioned 10k Elo mark
| was a real pain point for me and my friends. Every time
| we were due to pass it we ran into cheaters, smurfs and
| even a server crash once (incredible luck?). After over 3
| months we made it past 10k and climbed above 15k Elo
| within 2 weeks. - This is my experience and I have heard
| similar stories from other players. (Although ranks have
| been massively imbalanced at that time as well, which
| partly explains this?)
|
| Nevertheless, it's good to have a discussion about
| cheating - in CS2's case the experience can be so
| different depending on the region, ELO, trust factor, ...
| with Valorant the discussion simply gets shutdown way to
| often because of "Vanguard" and without a replay system
| you're just left to your own devices.
| xinayder wrote:
| They should implement honeypots like they did with Dota
| 2: https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/3677788723152833273
|
| but yeah I can agree, my friends say CS2 is full of
| cheaters, I have played 7-12k rating and I got only a few
| cheaters throughout this whole year of CS2.
|
| and they say they keep playing Valorant because there's
| way less cheaters than CS2.
| cmxch wrote:
| Blizzard's Warden + their legal team. While not strictly an
| FPS directed solution, I can play Heroes of the Storm in
| more places without breaking my system like Vanguard does
| for League of Legends.
| akira2501 wrote:
| My question would be can't the netcode be improved to
| prevent this in the first place? The fact that all players
| receive full game state enables this. In the early 2000s
| this made sense. Does it still today?
| rkharsan64 wrote:
| That will only protect you against wall hacks. This is a
| strategy known as fog of war. The server will not send
| the positions of players far from you. However, you still
| need to send the positions of players near you, but still
| behind walls, otherwise lag compensation won't work
| properly.
|
| This doesn't protect you against trigger bots (shoot
| automatically when you put your mouse on a target), aim
| bots (snap to targets, ranging from obvious hacks to very
| minute adjustments), and others.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > lag compensation
|
| That's already done entirely server side. It could only
| be. If you mean predictive positioning from the client
| side you can do that with far less state than gets
| transmitted today, and you could factor in the other
| players momentum on the server side to see if prediction
| would even be necessary in a given frame or not.
|
| The server could also send lots of phantom updates so the
| player client has no idea which objects are real and
| which aren't. The hacks could work around this but it
| would take a lot of power to do so. There's room for
| asymmetric counterhacks here.
|
| As for the other types of bots those are far less useful
| and more detectable by naked eye without wallhacks, which
| ironically, is because lag compensation is server side,
| these hacks do not have a deterministic outcome when
| used.
|
| When you look at a video of what a wallhack enables and
| how much state data gets transmitted that shouldn't be, I
| would be embarrassed to have such unworthy netcode in the
| 2020s. They've had 20 years and have done next to
| nothing.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Not to forget positional sound. Which is real part of
| these games and for that you need to send some
| information to clients.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Both CS and Valorant has had it for years, MOBA games as
| well. It works when you have maps with simple geometry.
| skizm wrote:
| As a counter strike player, I definitely shy away from the
| invasive anti cheat stuff... but I'd let valve inject it into
| my veins if it meant I could actually play and not suspect
| everyone of cheating all the time. Mostly because Valve has
| earned my trust. I won't install games from other companies
| using similarly invasive techniques though.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| While I trust valve, I'm not willing to mess up with my
| workstation to play.
|
| Also, there's hardware cheats, so I don't need a rootkit on
| my machine, but a server side thing that properly weeds bad
| players out through reports/trust and automated bans.
| janderland wrote:
| Reports only work so well. Overwatch has MANY cheater in
| spite of vigorous reporting.
| freeAgent wrote:
| Yeah, I generally trust Valve but gaming is definitely not
| important enough to me to give them kernel access to my
| system. I'm sure many gamers disagree with me though.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > a server side thing that properly weeds bad players out
| through reports/trust and automated bans.
|
| No. No no no.
|
| Automated bans via the report system is very well-known to
| be abused.
|
| Even if you implement a "trust" system where initially, all
| your reports are manually verified by game staff until its
| determined your reports are correct until your reports are
| acted on automatically, all it takes is a player to just be
| "good" until their trust is high enough, then start
| reporting people who don't actually deserve it.
|
| And I'm not convinced that server-side anti-cheat can be
| effective. You have to rely entirely on heuristics. Sure, a
| simple aim-bot that instantly snaps someone's aim right on
| someone's head might be detectable, but one that simply
| lets you see through walls certainly won't be if the player
| doesn't make it stupidly obvious by pre-aiming around every
| corner.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Valve wouldn't purposefully backdoor you for nefarious
| purposes. But any such code is not nearly reviewed enough to
| be sure it is free of unintentional backdoors that could be
| exploited by third parties.
| veunes wrote:
| Trust in a company plays a huge role here
| anonymousab wrote:
| I take it community moderation tools like voteban/votekick
| aren't sufficient anymore?
|
| They worked pretty well for pub matches back in CSS and 1.6,
| where it was pretty trivial for anyone to cheat or bot for
| free with minimal effort. I wonder what changed.
| jonathantf2 wrote:
| In a normal 5v5 match, you need everybody else on the team
| to vote yes to kick the cheater. If they're queued with
| someone else (which is very likely) then you've got no
| chance
| LinXitoW wrote:
| But you couldn't. After all, there's a lot of hardware based
| cheats that even KLA can't reliably detect.
|
| If you're "not sure if someones cheating or just good", maybe
| that's a mental problem with you? Put differently, if all
| cheaters were perfectly hidden (aka looked exactly like a
| real player of that skill level), would you still care? If
| yes, you seem more interested in a morality than actually
| enjoying the game.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Do you think a large percentage cares about _cheats in
| general_?
| ehnto wrote:
| Yep. I would call myself a privacy focused person, but given
| that Windows is the primary platform for PC gaming, and I trust
| Microsoft about as far as I can throw a their corporate
| headquarters, the platform is already compromised. Treat it
| accordingly, play your games. Maybe watch your adult films and
| write your memoirs on a different system than your gaming rig.
| veunes wrote:
| Ideally, players would be given both a choice and a clear
| breakdown of what's actually being collected or monitored.
| rldjbpin wrote:
| valve has their own ethos in this topic, which i wholeheartedly
| accept. you can guess which end of the spectrum they lie from
| the original news article.
|
| faceit for the longest time has had their own way around this.
| so did esea, before they ruined the trust forever
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5636233). some highly-
| motivated players still found ways around it
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39352331).
| dbrueck wrote:
| The anti-cheat problem is long-running and complicated. If you
| choose not to run anti-cheat because you understand that these
| are opaque rootkits, good for you! That's a totally, 100% valid
| choice. But please keep in mind: - you are a tiny
| minority and not the target customer - online multiplayer
| games are an absurdly big business (i.e. there are huge
| incentives here) - no, you can't completely solve this
| server side - elite players are insanely good - they are by
| definition outliers, so looking for statistical outliers is not
| in itself a solution - game companies are highly
| incentivized to work with (or at least not antagonize) the elite
| players (so just throwing them in matches with cheaters is not a
| solution) - the stakes are high both for the devs and their
| users, so "pretty good" anti-cheat is usually insufficient
|
| You can sum things up by saying that kernel-level anti-cheat DRM
| is the worst solution, except for all of the other solutions.
|
| I hope to see more discussion on possible solutions and tradeoffs
| - this is a challenging technical problem whose solution (if
| there is one) is fairly valuable.
|
| [edit: hopefully fixed the tone, per feedback]
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| Why isn't server-side anticheat a possible solution? Cheats can
| spoof inputs purely through visual output as well, meaning
| there cannot be full trust client-side.
| ukd1 wrote:
| Oh it's a solution, it's just worse than kernel-level - as
| it's much easier to bypass.
| burnished wrote:
| Not an expert but I've done a little reading and basically
| the combination of real time actions and a network makes it
| intractable, you end up just having to trust the client on
| some things (or having to make trade offs like a client
| potentially not having the information needed to display the
| game state to the player, or choppy/unresponsive gameplay as
| a function of latency).
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| >some things
|
| Any specific examples? I hear this said all the time and
| it's almost never true.
|
| Movement, for example: many decide to just let clients be
| fully authoritative over their positions and then act
| shocked when teleport hacks drop. Just keep track of the
| player's max move speed server-side, continually validate,
| and flag if they consistently move faster than is possible
| according to the server. No one is ever saying you have to
| validate inputs server-side in lock step with zero client-
| side prediction whatsoever and enforce 200ms of input lag
| for all players.
| lifeformed wrote:
| It's not teleporting that's hard to deal with, it's
| aimbots and wall hacks. You have to trust the client with
| enemy position information that it shouldn't be able to
| see yet, and trust their shot position inputs.
|
| Also, constantly flying around and teleporting is easy to
| catch, but using it in small bursts is very powerful and
| harder to catch.
| tga_d wrote:
| >You have to trust the client with enemy position
| information that it shouldn't be able to see yet
|
| That seems like something that would be solvable with
| location-style differential privacy. Report a number of
| plausible locations to the client small enough that it
| can efficiently anticipate them all, but large enough to
| prevent being able to auto-aim or wall hack. Run some
| bots or actual player movements recorded from other
| matches, originating from roughly the same point where
| you last saw the real opponent.
|
| >constantly flying around and teleporting is easy to
| catch, but using it in small bursts is very powerful and
| harder to catch
|
| Even small violations of continuity seem like they'd be
| observable server-side, no? I've not studied this, but
| presumably clients must be constantly phoning home with
| their position.
| musjleman wrote:
| > That seems like something that would be solvable with
| location-style differential privacy. Report a number of
| plausible locations to the client small enough that it
| can efficiently anticipate them all, but large enough to
| prevent being able to auto-aim or wall hack. Run some
| bots or actual player movements recorded from other
| matches, originating from roughly the same point where
| you last saw the real opponent.
|
| Has already been done in COD: Warzone. Varying levels of
| success, cheat developers end up heuristically
| eliminating fake players.
|
| > Even small violations of continuity seem like they'd be
| observable server-side, no? I've not studied this, but
| presumably clients must be constantly phoning home with
| their position.
|
| This issue usually is game/game-engine dependent and is
| achieved either by exploiting bugs or manipulating lag
| compensation. Not exactly a very common thing.
| lifeformed wrote:
| > Even small violations of continuity seem like they'd be
| observable server-side, no? I've not studied this, but
| presumably clients must be constantly phoning home with
| their position.
|
| Jumps in position are not always illegal: network issues,
| quirks from physics-based forces, glitches in the game,
| are all very common and can all cause unexpected
| positions. Differentiating from bannable offenses is not
| easy. Yes, there's always heuristics you can use to
| narrow down possible issues, but you have a limited CPU
| budget: You need to be running multiple instances per
| machine, each updating 60 times a second, serving dozens
| of players, sending and receiving constant updates to and
| from all players 30-60 times a second, while simulating
| physics, large worlds, complex player states, and
| synchronizing the states of thousands of objects. It's
| tricky to get everything right and performant. And people
| will get extremely mad if you make a false positive.
|
| > That seems like something that would be solvable with
| location-style differential privacy. Report a number of
| plausible locations to the client small enough that it
| can efficiently anticipate them all, but large enough to
| prevent being able to auto-aim or wall hack. Run some
| bots or actual player movements recorded from other
| matches, originating from roughly the same point where
| you last saw the real opponent.
|
| But what is the client suppose to do when actually seeing
| the real position? At someone the waveform needs to
| collapse and reveal the real location. The only way to
| make the fake locations indistinguishable from the real
| ones is to make them a real enemy player from the
| client's point of view. But then you stumble across all
| these fake enemies that don't do anything? You could
| place them in unreachable positions so normal players
| wouldn't ever find them. But then the heuristics for
| checking if a client "knows" about the position is still
| quite fuzzy. Also, visuals aren't the only giveaway of an
| enemy location. Audio is also location based. Playing
| fake audio would be detrimental to normal players'
| experiences.
|
| Having said that, the unreachable-fake-player technique
| is not bad, it can cut out some low hanging fruit. But
| it's only part of the equation of a robust anti-cheat
| solution. It's complex to implement and only gets you
| some cheaters.
| phire wrote:
| A good anti-cheat solution needs both client side and server
| side components, they complement each other.
|
| You also need active human involvement, both as moderators
| and evolving the anti-cheat technology over time.
| fireant wrote:
| We're mostly talking about FPS here, you've got 2 main cheat
| categories: aimbots and esps (visibility hacks)
|
| Esps are purely client side, they read actors from game's
| memory and draw a client side overlay. It's impossible to
| protect against these on the server. Even if you had perfect
| culling from the server (didn't send players behind walls for
| example) you'd still have semitransparent surfaces like
| foliage and smoke. There are people making good money in PUBG
| just making enemy textures that are easier to see. You need
| kernel anticheat to prevent the cheat reading the memory.
| Also you want to take screenshots periodically and detect
| overlays.
|
| Aimbots in the olden days could be detected on the server
| because their movements were instant, precise, unnatural
| snaps. But these days cheat developers have wisened up. Again
| the best protection is to prevent the cheat from reading the
| games memory in the first place, some anticheats go as far as
| to try to prevent input from any artificial device (so the
| cheat can't create mouse movement)
|
| There are also movement hacks, but I don't think that these
| are really common these days. You can detect protect against
| these on the server side
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Just adding that occlusion only works with games that have
| simple geometry, 90 degree corners, straight corridors,
| enclosed areas and no large difference in elevation. So its
| useful in games like CS or Valorant, but will not work well
| in open games like Battlefield or Escape from Tarkov.
|
| There's also DMA based cheats that will read memory with
| another computer which can then output an ESP overlay to a
| HDMI or DP merge box that will show both the game and
| overlay on your monitor. They can also do aimbot by adding
| mouse inputs to a device you connect your mouse.
|
| Websites sell DMA cards and these other devices together.
| talldayo wrote:
| > I'd love to see more curiosity from the HN community on this.
|
| I'd love to see more curiosity from developers - the
| disappointment is mutual. Instead of attempting to
| systematically stop _all_ forms of cheating through innovative
| or competitive methods, it would appear the industry is
| converging on dangerous half-measures and excusing it with
| evidence from a clearly failing system.
|
| What should we, the users, expect? Perfect, cheat-free software
| that surveils us endlessly, or "good enough" security that lets
| users decide for themselves which servers are suitable? Let me
| cast my vote, and I know which ideal _I_ consider realistic and
| attainable.
| Levitating wrote:
| > I'd love to see more curiosity from developers
|
| Developers spent millions on Anti-Cheat. It's why entire
| products like EasyAntiCheat and BattleEye exists.
|
| Valve spent a LOT of time and effort on VACNet, a server side
| machine learning based Anti-Cheat primarily trained only on
| CS:GO verdicts and it was awful still.
|
| Developers know the common methods used by cheaters. That
| includes exploiting known vulnerable kernel drivers to run
| code in the kernel. The only way to monitor for this is to
| utilize a kernel module loaded before that of the cheater.
| That's why the current state of Anti-Cheat is the way it is.
|
| The developers of various anti-cheats like Vanguard have been
| very transparent about this.[1]
|
| [1]: https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-null-
| anti...
| sunshowers wrote:
| While all of what you're saying is true, I think it is worth
| noting that historically a large chunk of this problem was
| solved by communities hosting servers. I agree that in the
| matchmaking era, remote attestation via kernel-level anticheat
| is the inevitable solution that you converge to after a few
| iterations.
|
| And yes, servers would often kick out people who were too
| outside of the general skill level, even if they weren't
| cheating. As (say) a p80 player, playing against a p99 player
| feels roughly as bad as playing against a cheater. (But of
| course the p99 player is doing so honestly.)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _historically a large chunk of this problem was solved by
| communities hosting servers_
|
| Yes and no.
|
| I lived through that era too, and there are serious scaling
| problems: at some point, trying to banhammer griefers with
| rotating IPs becomes a full time job, and then the public
| servers turn into a dumpster fire.
| sunshowers wrote:
| Yeah, having written that I was thinking about this as
| well. There's a lot of unpaid labor involved in that model.
| Maybe, between rootkits and that kind of exploitation of
| humans, rootkits are the less unjust option.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'd be curious how many anti-cheat rootkit vendors that
| there are out there, though. It seems like the sort of
| industry that consolidation to 3-4 larger, more well-
| funded vendors would be beneficial in terms of security.
|
| Versus everyone rolling their own or using smaller /
| cheaper solutions.
| consteval wrote:
| Solution: submit them for an account ban.
|
| The games that have the most cheating either:
|
| 1. don't do account bans
|
| 2. don't limit account creation
|
| You can trivially limit account creation by just charging
| money for the games.
| sunshowers wrote:
| I think free to play is where the market has ended up.
|
| I get it, though, I kind of stopped playing competitive
| games after it became all about the F2P grind. Even
| cosmetics-only F2P hits a part of my brain that I try
| keeping in check. I just play single-player and
| cooperative games now.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| When one enters the career and/or family stage of life,
| it doesn't make sense to compete against people who have
| the time commitments of neither. ;)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Account bans + community servers don't work either, as
| the chain of custody for evidence is tainted.
|
| I say consteval was caught cheating on the server I run,
| and that account should be banned.
|
| Am I, my server's admin, lying?
| jeff_carr wrote:
| Not at all correct! Nothing of what was said is true. The
| actual reality is:
|
| * Microsoft makes piles of money from Gaming * Microsoft got
| involved with Gaming to damage Linux adoption and corporate
| support (Sony/Linux/Playstation) * Microsoft spends massive
| amounts of attention on gaming to lock in the general public
| to Windows * Microsoft continues to lose to Linux * Microsoft
| uses cheating to lie about open source being 'something
| something' cheaters
|
| The fact of the matter is that Microsoft has absolutely no
| interest in an open source solution to these problems and are
| using these issues to lie, mislead and spread FUD in some
| absurd fantasy world where only some superior microsoft
| driven closed source solution is the only possible way this
| can be solved. All of that is a complete lie. Nothing more.
|
| A smart linux and free software lawyer would be wise to file
| a class action lawsuit for discovery documents inside
| Microsoft where one would undoubtedly find piles of emails
| between the executives hell bent on doing everything to
| damage Linux adoption have stupidly wielded this unidentified
| axe which is actually a -4 cursed boat anchor.
|
| Anyone that tells you that computer security or trust can
| only be done with proprietary software is lying to you for
| their own benefit.
| sunshowers wrote:
| Sorry, where did Microsoft come in? I'm not sure what
| Microsoft thinks but I do see both the ups and the downs of
| remote attestation.
| latexr wrote:
| > I'd love to see more curiosity from the HN community on this.
|
| These kinds of sweeping comments are as frequent as they are
| tiring. There are other comments like yours in this thread and
| yours is currently at the top. It has nothing to do with a lack
| of curiosity, you're simply seeing the contrarian dynamic at
| play.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601
| dbrueck wrote:
| I appreciate the feedback - I've edited the comment to
| hopefully do better. Thank you for taking the time!
| cmxch wrote:
| Rejoinder: Blizzard's Warden. No bootkit, no invasive system
| configuration required, even plays nice with "niche/enthusiast"
| platforms like Linux, doesn't even care if your keyboard isn't
| a bit niche too.
|
| Thought: If they expect a console level of lockdown, why do
| they bother writing for the PC? If I wanted a $game_console,
| I'd buy the console.
| dbrueck wrote:
| Hmm... isn't Blizzard's main FPS title Overwatch though?
| Cheating seems pretty common in that game (and there are tons
| of forum threads where people are complaining about it).
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Forum threads aren't a great measure of cheating though,
| given the toxicity and inability of the average gamer to
| admit "the other player was better than me."
| pezezin wrote:
| There are tons of forum threads about gamers complaining
| about every single game in history. Seriously, most gaming
| forums are incredibly toxic.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| I have about 1500 hours in OW and OW2. I can't recall ever
| playing with/against a cheater.
| Gamemaster1379 wrote:
| > game companies are highly incentivized to work with (or at
| least not antagonize) the elite players
|
| Actually, this is generally untrue. Companies BELIEVE this but
| often times, these players are a vocal minority put on pedastal
| and they often end up making the game worse for the general
| player base.
| dbrueck wrote:
| Sorry for not being more clear, I was referring to the
| advertising or promotion that comes via the elite players.
| Take Valorant, for example. Riot Games leveraged their League
| of Legends user base and gave early access to high-end
| players and that apparently played a big part in helping its
| popularity take off. Now it has a robust presence in eSports,
| again helped by the high-end players.
|
| It's not uncommon now for popular professional streamers to
| get early access to new features/modes because the game
| companies know that those players can help build or retain
| the player base.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Are they popular because they are the best, or because they
| are entertaining ?
|
| I wouldn't discount those mediocre (or even outright bad)
| at the game, but moving huge audiences...
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| >no, you can't completely solve this server side
|
| This is what every dev who can't be bothered to implement
| relevancy filters says when their server broadcasts the
| locations of every hidden player to every other player every
| tick and wallhacks drop a week later
|
| _Exactly_ what can 't be fixed server side? Are you just
| talking about aimbots and other situations where script kiddies
| can trivially author bots that generate optimal inputs? Because
| at a certain point that's more a problem with shitty, boring
| game design that got stale 20 years ago; if the top of your
| game's execution ceiling is "can the player click on heads
| perfectly" you have bigger problems
| dbrueck wrote:
| Relevancy filtering is more for network traffic optimization,
| it doesn't really help with cheating in most cases. In a FPS,
| for example, the actors the cheater most wants to know about
| are almost always also network relevant.
|
| But taking a step back, for fast games (like an FPS), the
| latency requirements drive you to send semi-secret info to
| the client (like the positions of other players), and so
| that's where things start to break down. But the traffic in
| the other direction is a problem too, as you have all of the
| scenarios in which the messages to the server (e.g. aim info,
| timing of weapon of firing) can be spoofed or engineered.
|
| The motivation for the client-side anti-cheat systems is to
| extend as far as possible the envelope of what is considered
| trustworthy - i.e. if they can't solve the latency problem,
| then they try to make the client more trusted.
|
| It's impossible to completely solve the problem, so it's
| about finding a solution that solves as much of the problem
| as possible. Unfortunately the main thing going for kernel
| anti-cheat is that most users don't care that they have to
| let someone root their machines to play a game, though the
| tide would likely turn if there were a high publicity
| exploit.
| lifeformed wrote:
| "All cheats can be trivially solved server side, as long as I
| exclude all games I don't like, which are also the games
| where the problem is hardest to solve and most relevant to
| the discussion."
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Server side can not do anything about ESP or aimbot as they
| rely only in information that the server must provide the to
| the client. ESP can be curbed somewhat by obfuscating objects
| not in their view, but how effective this is depends very
| much on map geometry as the server must send it at some
| point. It works okay in games like CS/Valorant (that already
| has it implemented for years) but does basically nothing in
| Battlefield/Apex/Escape from Tarkov as they have very open
| maps. Aimbot can be configured to be pretty much
| indistinguishable from the best players.
| nox101 wrote:
| Do you think it will escalate to the point that client side
| checks will be worthless? Say in 5yrs I can let an AI watch the
| screen and control the mouse and keyboard. From the rootkitted
| computer, it can't tell I used an external AI to control the
| USB keyboard and mouse.
| zerd wrote:
| In 5 years -> hobby project 3 years ago:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXA7zXVz8A4
| 127 wrote:
| Just use local servers and player validation signatures.
| Faceless matchmaking is bullshit. Local communities win. Don't
| mix e-sports with casual game-play. Just like you don't need a
| security detail for the average person, you don't need invasive
| anti-cheat for the average gamer.
| bitsandboots wrote:
| Perhaps true of competitive games. But I find anticheat mainly
| exists to protect microtransaction games. And generally those
| games aren't worth playing, so having the little badge on steam
| can help avoid wastes of time.
| agentultra wrote:
| Yeah... it's more that the anti-cheat itself provides surface
| area for RCE's than the anti-chest company using it nefariously.
| yreg wrote:
| I've just reinstalled GTA V last week and I was very surprised to
| find out that I now have to install a rootkit to run it.
|
| They had the balls to add a mandatory kernel extension into a
| game that I've bought 10 years ago and that I wish to play in
| single player only.
|
| I find it utterly ridiculous. As usual, piracy would have been
| the superior experience.
| neilv wrote:
| One of the reasons I run a PS5 instead.
|
| AFAIK, there's fewer cheaters on PlayStation current-gen than
| on PC, and I don't have to worry about anti-cheat kludges
| corrupting my "rig".
| Aeolun wrote:
| You mean all the anti-cheat options are pre-built into your
| rig?
| portaouflop wrote:
| Which is fine on a device that you only use for gaming, or
| am I missing something?
| dmichulke wrote:
| Well, you run untrusted code in your local network.
|
| Then again, we all trust our "smart" devices even if we
| really don't.
|
| I suppose a separate network would be the safe option (if
| you trust your router).
|
| That said, have there been rotten meat attacks using
| "temporarily above temperature" fridges?
|
| Are vegans just applying a defensive strategy against
| those?
| lxgr wrote:
| Not nearly every "gaming PC" is used for only that.
|
| When I grew up, I had one PC to do everything: Homework,
| gaming, learning to program, storing the single copy of
| treasured family photos, gaining painful experience in
| why to make backups before modifying the MBR to dual-boot
| Linux...
|
| Especially with iPads and Chromebooks becoming more
| prevalent in an education context, a "gaming PC" might
| well be the only computer that gives the user full
| control over it that many children have access to these
| days.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Computers were much more expensive back in the days and
| would be obsolete much faster.
|
| Nowadays for 50EUR you can have a decent second hand
| computer with an older gen core i5 and 8 to 16GB of
| memory. That is plenty enough to run qubesOS.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I get where both sides are coming from.
|
| On the one hand, buying a console and a reasonably spec'd
| laptop is clearly the better value. I did this during
| college, and both my laptop, and my console both lasted
| about a _decade_ without requiring any upgrades. I did
| this again with the PS4. You wind up spending _far_ less
| than you otherwise would trying to keep a gaming pc
| reasonably up to date, and both devices are optimized for
| their usage.
|
| On the other hand? At some point most of us will realize
| that we've been successful enough that we don't _have_ to
| optimize for value, and we can choose 'all of the
| above'. I now have a PS5 AND a stupidly overspec'd AI /
| gaming desktop. I've enjoyed having both.
| grbrr wrote:
| Yes, so you don't have to run a rootkit on a machine that
| you might file your taxes on.
| echoangle wrote:
| I would bet 90% of people here have at least another
| laptop if they have a gaming PC, if you're concerned
| about being compromised by rootkits, just do your taxes
| on that.
| stavros wrote:
| There's nothing "just" about compromising one of my
| machines so badly that I don't trust it to file my taxes
| on any more.
| lostlogin wrote:
| So you own one machine and Rockstar owns the other?
| echoangle wrote:
| Well that was supposed to be the deal with the
| PlayStation, too.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| "Your computer calls me root too"
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yes. It's kind of an odd situation, because it's one where
| it's a benefit _to me_ if _other people_ are running anti-
| cheat. A limited sort of remote attestation that the people
| you 're playing with aren't running certain kinds of
| software that peeks into or alters the memory image of the
| game or its graphics drivers.
| pixxel wrote:
| You've just got Sony watching over you and transcribing your
| audio conversations with friends.
| generalpf wrote:
| "Shoot that guy" "Ok"
|
| Super valuable stuff.
| croes wrote:
| Training data for AI
| WithinReason wrote:
| Sony is training the AI drones for the battlefields of
| the future from gamer conversations
| Lanolderen wrote:
| Can't wait to hear "Who you challin lil bro" as I get
| shot in the ass by a drone.
| shultays wrote:
| Not only future drones will get better at killing you,
| they will also learn to shit talk after doing that
| notabee wrote:
| Or more likely, listening to background noise to spy on
| what family members are saying and listening for
| marketing/brand trigger words. It may not be very human
| audible but if it's machine audible it will probably be
| scraped.
| Woeps wrote:
| This is the exact reason why is started with streaming
| services for games (Gfore/boosteroid/game pass). Next the
| anti-cheat thing I also spend less waiting for updates. And
| this way I can still play these games with my buddies.
| mrpippy wrote:
| Add '-nobattleye' to the Steam command-line launch options and
| you can play single-player without any installs.
|
| (Rockstar really should've made this a separate launch option
| like other games do)
| soderfoo wrote:
| > (Rockstar really should've made this a separate launch
| option like other games do)
|
| This is what happens when a producer's/product manager's
| _cherished_ KPIs come before UX.
|
| In their mind, adding a toggle in the launcher would lead to
| lower engagement and player acquisition.
|
| We, the players, fail to recognize how our gaming experience
| can be _enhanced_ by using _social features_ like leader
| boards, guilds, or in game chat. We are not enlightened.
|
| Think about all the fun and exciting connections you'd miss
| out on if all the social crap was off by default or in an
| easily accessible place.
|
| I'm honestly surprised it's a command line option. My guess
| is that the requirement originated externally.
| veunes wrote:
| If the decision came from an external party, it's likely
| from publishers
| parl_match wrote:
| > This is what happens when a producer's/product manager's
| cherished KPIs come before UX.
|
| > In their mind, adding a toggle in the launcher would lead
| to lower engagement and player acquisition.
|
| Not "in their mind". It does and they have the data to show
| it. Very frustrating situation.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| It's GTA, if they want to get to Mars... release six
| there. Just shoot the gold copy out there. People will
| show up.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Not sure if, at this point, it costs SpaceX more money to
| get to Mars, or Rockstar Games to develop GTA 6. AAA
| budgets are insane (with IMO meagre results - I don't
| like most of them).
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Tough call. Everything is bloated
| ljm wrote:
| A lot of time and money goes into AAA games and I think
| there's an inverse relationship at play where the higher
| the budget is, the more risk averse the studio is. So you
| end up with a whole suite of AAA releases that all play
| it safe and just copy small innovations from each other,
| nobody really daring to push the envelope too far.
|
| I don't really enjoy those games either any more. Too
| big, too long, and the gameplay feels more like running
| errands and checking off a todo list than having fun.
|
| Release cycles in the 90s and early 2000s were pretty
| tight, slowly getting longer as storage and graphical
| firepower increased. 3D was totally new and studios were
| trying out all kinds of crazy ideas for games. These days
| you can basically expect 90% of mainstream releases to
| follow the same playbook.
| soderfoo wrote:
| Yeah, it's just me being an idealist and projecting.
|
| I acknowledge what the analytics show, but always allude
| to the hypothetical _casual loner segment_ who we lack
| data on because we pushed them away or we don 't measure
| things relevant to them.
|
| I'm a _boomer millenial_ , or whatever we're called now,
| and never took to online gaming, so I'm part of this
| segment.
|
| Casual loners are irrelevant to the monetization and in
| game economy people, resulting in relegation to second
| class status.
|
| Until someone figures out a way to milk this segment for
| that juicy recurring revenue, consumable$, $kins, etc...,
| we must accept our fate, largely an afterthought.
| romwell wrote:
| I'm disagreeing with everything you're saying here.
|
| Not because you're wrong.
|
| But because I'm in this picture and I don't like it, and
| I just found out that "boomer millennial" is a fitting
| descriptor.
|
| Goddamit.
| Uvix wrote:
| You're in denial now; you'll work your way to acceptance
| soon enough (as someone who's done the same thing).
| soderfoo wrote:
| Thanks for the chuckle, brightened up my day.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Yet we are the people who started gaming on PCs -- we
| made consumer 3D accelerators profitable and spent the
| time writing about them on forums in the 90s and 2000s.
| We certainly have the power to move markets.
| bitsandboots wrote:
| People who can't be monetized sometimes are valued in
| their opinions. If someone principled really likes a
| thing, it can gain more popularity by others who trust
| that person adopting it. Maybe not loners. But there's
| still reason to make users happy because viral marketing
| impact cannot be measured well.
| NeoTar wrote:
| > I'm a boomer millenial, or whatever we're called now,
| and never took to online gaming, so I'm part of this
| segment.
|
| And you are not alone - apparently 53% of gamers (total)
| prefer single-player games, [although this falls to only
| 30% in the 16-19 years age-group].
| https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/most-gamers-prefer-
| single...
|
| I wonder how much of this is familiarity (i.e. I play
| games in the style I did when I was sixteen) versus
| people in older age-groups having less sustained time for
| gaming (i.e. grabbing twenty minutes while the baby
| sleeps) and single-player being inherently better for
| that use-case.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Part of it is reflexes too. I used to _love_ fast paced
| FPS games as a teen and was actually pretty good at them
| until my early 30 's. As time went on, I started noticing
| I was doing consistently worse in 1v1 firefights. I
| started gravitating towards games that had a 'slower' way
| to contribute like playing vehicles in the battlefield
| series.
|
| As time goes on I've gotten more and more into single
| player games, especially games that let me build stuff.
| dingnuts wrote:
| REAL-TIME multiplayer is worse for that use case. There's
| no reason a game that is asynchronous, like an old school
| play by mail game, couldn't be fun for twenty minutes
| when you have time, and maybe there's a limit or a turn
| involved so you don't get too ahead, and your partner
| does their thing when they get time
|
| I have wanted to see a game like that for years and
| years. I think this is why chess.com is huge with the
| youths, as it fits my description and is fairly unique --
| I just don't personally care for chess.
| nemomarx wrote:
| it's a little old but check frozen synapse - top down
| tactics games like that have done asynchronous
| multiplayer a decent bit
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| This is because the multiplayer games we played at 16 are
| 10-15 years old. You literally can't go back to those
| happy memories again. You play halo 3 today you get
| wrecked by the people who haven't stopped regularly
| playing in over a decade. And when you try and play the
| latest fps game you go this sucks, its not halo 3.
| _factor wrote:
| Government regulation of toxic waste dumping negatively
| impacts profit margins. We have the data to prove this,
| very frustrating situation.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| To be fair, the societal harm from deciding to play
| multiplayer instead of single player is probably a few
| orders of magnitude less than toxic waste in the water.
| crest wrote:
| Granted, but how about the societal harm from an
| exploitable bug in one or more of these rootkits?
| Millions of gaming computers could wreck some havoc in
| the hands of an even slightly creative attacker not
| restrained by moral or economic considerations...
| xelamonster wrote:
| But that's why the government had to regulate it. If
| companies have financial incentive to do something
| they're going to do it, to make them stop that incentive
| must be removed. I don't think that comment was intending
| to justify the situation.
| parl_match wrote:
| That would not be a frustrating situation, that would be
| a great situation (the harm is being blocked).
| hx8 wrote:
| People cannot say no if you never ask for informed
| consent. If the PC is personal then a root kit is a
| violation.
| bippihippi1 wrote:
| read the TOS
| gigatexal wrote:
| Call of duty 6 launches the single player campaign from the
| main launcher and I noticed they advertise the anti cheat
| stuff being enabled (I forget what it's called). For a single
| player game. Smh.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Achievements are serious business
| archagon wrote:
| I think it's also no longer possible to play the single
| player of these games offline.
| veunes wrote:
| Piracy shouldn't feel like the "premium version" of a
| product...
| johnisgood wrote:
| But the reality is that it often is.
| bitsandboots wrote:
| Ownership is the premium version of a product. Turns out
| piracy is sometimes the only ownership option. Everything
| else is just a subscription, license, service.
| tantalor wrote:
| This is true for watching NFL.
|
| Option 1: subscribe to 7 streaming services which each have
| some unpredictable subset of games
|
| Option 2: go to some website that has all the games
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| The MLS did this with their Apple deal (pay a maximum of
| $120 for a season and you're guaranteed to get every league
| match of the season through the "TV" app), and it's been
| reasonably successful. That said, the league used that
| money in part to bring in Lionel Messi, and his significant
| international following came along with him, so it's hard
| to parse out how much of that is because they made the
| games easy to access (with the significant asterisk that
| Linux and Android users are stuck with a web app) versus
| his singular impact.
|
| The other part of this is that MLS is significantly smaller
| (~$275m in non-team-sponsorship revenue in 2023) than other
| North American leagues (the NHL, the next-largest league,
| had ~$6.75b in non-team-sponsorship revenue in 2023), so I
| don't know how reasonable it is for other leagues to follow
| the MLS's path.
| k4rli wrote:
| What's even worse is with this update they completely cut off
| Linux users. It had been performing better than on W*ndows but
| they had to ruin the game.
|
| Surely this is foreshadowing the future of GTA VI and will have
| the same problems of being unplayable.
| dartharva wrote:
| As he said, pirating is the better option. I'm guessing all
| pirate releases of GTA V will run perfectly on Linux.
| lmm wrote:
| So why didn't you pirate it? At some point people need to stop
| complaining and start putting their money where their mouth is.
| dspillett wrote:
| It had already been bought some time ago, this was stated as
| a reinstall.
|
| Using a pirate copy now might avoid the rootkit, but it would
| not send a message to the publisher as they'll not see a
| difference between not getting any money for this new install
| and not getting any money for this new install. Any
| difference in a numbers-playing stat, if the pirate version
| doesn't call home to be counted in those, is likely not
| significant.
| nottorp wrote:
| I stopped getting Rockstar games for PC when the Steam store
| page for Max Payne 3 was lying that a rockstar club account was
| only required for multiplayer. Turns out it was mandatory for
| single player too instead.
|
| I did get GTA V for playstation, and indeed you can play single
| player without the rockstar account. Probably Sony forcing them
| to allow that, I don't think they did it out of the goodness of
| their hearts.
|
| However, every time you start the game you get a screen pushing
| you towards multiplayer. And the single time I did click on
| some multiplayer related options, they spammed my playstation
| system notifications with 'there are new events in GTA online'
| even in weeks I didn't start their title at all.
|
| So... good bye, rockstar. Your games are getting too big for
| their own good anyway.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| We need to stop normalizing the idea that businesses can change
| the offer of a purchased product after the fact.
|
| > These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at
| Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have
| altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further."
|
| https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed
| strogonoff wrote:
| Big game publishers will inevitably flex the "we can impose any
| restrictions we want at any time, go sue us" in your face at
| some point. Piracy is indeed the superior experience,
| unfortunately, though I would add a caveat that as a rule it
| does not apply to indie titles.
|
| (At least while they stay indie... Not long ago I was
| reinstalling Minecraft after a long break and found out that
| Microsoft has the balls to demand that I verify a phone number
| to play a game I bought more than 10 years ago. Like with GTA
| V's rootkit, they don't care if you want to play single-player
| --once you're locked out of the loader, you're locked out and
| no human will help you.)
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Honest question.
|
| Would a Windows10-11 user be able to tell there are "rootkits"
| embedded in installations, without looking at the (optional)
| disclosures made available now on steam ?
|
| In other words, what guarantee is there that if i'm buying a
| game from Steam, or say GOG, that there's no quasi-malware
| riding along with the game install ?
| nemomarx wrote:
| in general anti cheat will advertise that it has kernel level
| access and might need admin permission during install
|
| if you're worried about hidden stuff I'm not sure how you
| could tell
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Are these anti-cheats kernel modules? _Asking because I only play
| two games on Linux and they do not use rootkits._ If so one could
| at least prevent the installation using a couple sysctl variables
| [1]. I do not recommend putting this in /etc/sysctl.conf or in
| the .d directory as it can break OS updates among other things...
| I would instead put it in a startup script so that it can easily
| be disabled and the node rebooted. This would be in the cases the
| game installer wants elevated privileges and silently tries to
| install the modules. Obviously it will break the game but maybe
| that will happen soon enough so that one can request a refund for
| the games that did not disclose the rootkit. Once these are set
| to 1 on a running system the only way to set back to 0 is to
| disable that startup script and reboot as it becomes immutable on
| a running system. Your OS update tools should also be wrapped to
| check if this is enabled, warn you and politely abort until it is
| unset. The failure conditions are not strictly binary and may
| work, or appear to work until the machine is bricked.
|
| Related to this it may be worth installing something that does
| checksum snapshots of the filesystems to see if a game has
| tampered with system files. OSSEC, chkrootkit or even a cron job
| that just does this manually and runs diffs. While some package
| managers have this functionality they will usually ignore files
| outside of the package manifest that may get picked up by the
| system. Immutable off-system backups are of course good too.
| # do not put in /etc/sysctl.conf, instead use a startup script or
| a script that is run prior to starting Steam. sysctl -w
| "kernel.modules_disabled=1" sysctl -w
| "kernel.kexec_load_disabled=1"
|
| [1] - https://linux-audit.com/increase-kernel-integrity-with-
| disab...
| Terr_ wrote:
| There are two trends in the broader multiplayer game ecosystem
| which I think are worth highlighting:
|
| 1. More games are trying to cut costs with ad-hoc P2P servers,
| meaning that sometimes important logic is occurring on a not-so-
| trusted machine.
|
| 2. More games are using a revenue model which may be threatened
| by consumer-side tinkering.
|
| For example, imagine a cooperative game that uses a P2P server,
| and the host has done something to make it much easier for the
| squad to get a drop of the Super Special Loot (#1) and the rarity
| of the loot through gameplay drives many players to purchase it
| though an in-game store.
| mmis1000 wrote:
| Critical login happen at client machine is how fps games work
| at all. It's way too late to judge every hit on server due to
| the latency. A 40ms latency is 3 frame lag even on a 60fps
| monitor. And It can be a lot worse in a lot of cases. The
| server may detect some hit that is too far off and impossible.
| But it have to trust what client says as long as it is on some
| reasonable range or the game won't even work.
|
| And that reasonable range isn't that small. It is enough to
| make every bullet that was supposed to shoot on air shoot on
| the enemies' heads.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Did you mean to post that to a different subthread?
|
| I'm familiar with FPS networking, however I'm talking about a
| trend where a customer-machine is designated to act as a
| game-server, so that the company can avoid paying to host one
| in a dedicated but more-secure fashion.
|
| If that machines happens to be the attacker's, then their
| scope for chicanery is so much greater than just wallhacks or
| aimbots.
|
| For example, they might temporarily or permanently grant
| everyone equipment that is otherwise locked behind some
| grind-wall, where the company hopes to make money selling a
| "level boost". While not totally malicious, it's definitely a
| "hack" the company will oppose.
| nathants wrote:
| kernel level anticheat is not enough.
|
| client inputs have to be trusted, and there is no provenance. the
| kernel has no visibility of inputs.
|
| i'm shipping a 100 player matchmaking game now. clients tick at
| 360hz, server ticks at 120hz. fair up to 60 ping, which covers
| entire continents. servers are metal, not vms. epyc 4244p with
| 2Gbps egress, 1 server per 15 minute game. mitigations=off and
| nosmt on all clients and the server.
|
| i love steam, but won't be releasing this there.
|
| it's reboot-to-play, a modified archlinux iso that boots directly
| into the game from a usb drive.
|
| i control not only the kernel, but the os, and every running
| program. you don't get cortana. you don't get discord. you don't
| get spotify. you get the game. for the duration of play, your pc
| becomes an arcade machine.
|
| still, this is not enough.
|
| to play ranked, you're going to have to get a handcam over your
| left shoulder. it will see head orientation, both hands, full
| mousepad, and screen. you're also going to use fixed mouse speed,
| mousepad size, and monitor size. reviewing any players inputs
| will look familiar, since everyone is playing with identical
| settings and setup.
|
| kernel anticheat is not enough. we need a reproducible full os
| setup, down to running programs and network connections.
|
| even that is not enough. we need provenance of user inputs hooked
| right up to the game replay system, so you or anyone can review
| engagements from any parties perspective.
|
| obviously this should all be opt in. not everyone wants to play
| ranked, and whole-os anticheat should help even without input
| provenance.
|
| have you ever wondered if you died to a cheater or a god? do you
| wish you could never wonder again? i do. soon, i won't.
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| I assume this is satire, because nobody would play a game with
| those requirements.
| nathants wrote:
| i would never joke about cheaters, spammers, or other
| netizens of ill repute.
|
| if this is a challenge, consider it accepted.
|
| link in bio.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure. Life has taught me that people will
| accept damn near anything in order to get the entertainment
| they want. If you worked your way up to the point OP
| describes slowly, over time, I wouldn't be at all surprised
| if people shrugged and said "it's just what you have to do if
| you want to play those games".
| nathants wrote:
| to be honest, all of this would be worth it just to never
| have to listen to fortnite streamers whine about
| cheating/bugs/ping/serverlag/stormsurge/etc ever again. i
| understand why they whine, but i just don't want to hear it
| anymore.
|
| i sympathize with their pain, and i have the solution.
| jokoon wrote:
| could be made necessary for pro players many of them were
| caught cheating
| rxyz wrote:
| I opened the website in his profile and joined the discord.
|
| Yes there's a discord for this.
| nathants wrote:
| welcome to the team. reboot-to-play is the future.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| honestly, we have consoles for this dude
| nathants wrote:
| exactly! what we need is more power, and more mouse room.
|
| anyone playing fortnite ranked already has the needed
| hardware, and the motivation.
|
| if you haven't won a solo build game on 1440p 360hz, you
| haven't ever actually played a video game.
| digging wrote:
| > if you haven't won a solo build game on 1440p 360hz, you
| haven't ever actually played a video game.
|
| I think this is the most insane thing you've written here
| today, the one thing I truly disagree with. I'm not sure
| _you_ even agree with it, given you seem to already
| understand well the difference between casual, competitive,
| and hardcore competitive play. But are you aware of solo
| play?
| nathants wrote:
| the distinction i'm trying to draw, is that while the
| term gaming is beloved, it is a very large umbrella. i
| don't have a new term to offer, but i stand by what i
| said. 1440p360 solo build win IS a different type of
| thing than launching a rocket in factorio. we are going
| to need new terms.
|
| it's not about casual vs competitive. it's about how the
| game feels to play, and how the adrenaline hits your
| blood stream.
| dlock17 wrote:
| All of this, when you can just play on console. I know cheaters
| theoretically exist there, but in low enough numbers on my PS5
| games that they don't impact my user experience.
|
| Kudos to your insane game plan. Gonna be hard to get any
| marketing from Twitch streamers though.
| nathants wrote:
| thanks! if the plan isn't insane, why bother.
|
| ps5 can't play 360hz and can't use performance mode graphics.
| consoles are great, but esports will always be on pc.
|
| input cheats are common on pc and console, there isn't a
| difference anymore.
|
| dual pc streaming will work fine. maybe we include obs in the
| iso at some point, but probably not.
|
| also, this game is mnk only. next game will be controller
| only. gotta keep inputs standardized or fair play isn't
| possible.
| maccard wrote:
| > thanks! if the plan isn't insane, why bother.
|
| This is the only reason you need to keep going.
|
| > ps5 can't play 360hz and can't use performance mode
| graphics. This [0] is your game. Without running it
| (because I'm not installing your OS on my machine, no
| offence) there's no reason that wouldn't run at 360Hz on a
| PS5. A PS5 is an 8 core machine with a dedicated GPU; it's
| going to be vastly more powerful (and has the advantage of
| being standardised hardware) than the random beater laptops
| your players are going to run. If you're talking about
| rendering at 360Hz - How many people realistically have
| that sort of monitor? And if they need to splash out PS250
| for it, we're getting close to the price of a console
| _anyway_ where you can play other games too.
|
| > consoles are great, but esports will always be on pc.
|
| Except for fighting games, sports games, and most
| importantly CoD.
|
| > input cheats are common on pc and console, there isn't a
| difference anymore.
|
| Theoretically, yes. Practically speaking, input cheats are
| widespread on PC, and non-existant on console. (that's not
| to say XIM and co don't exist, but they're nowhere near the
| adoption level that's seen on PC).
|
| [0] https://better.game/#/
| nathants wrote:
| i mean, i haven't built an os. it's just standard
| archlinux with minor conf. my binaries will run, but they
| would regardless of the platform.
|
| i can't tell users to go into bios and turn off smt. i
| can tell them to boot an iso, and have it preset to do
| that via kernel cmdline. owning the os means i can tune
| the network stack, the os, the kernel, anything that
| helps performance. the game itself has minimal config,
| only keybinds.
|
| i'm really targeting one player base: fortnite
| ranked/competitive players.
|
| fortnite competitive does exist on console, but barely.
| it's an after thought, and the game can barely run, even
| on ps5. most importantly, it doesn't let you set graphics
| to the settings every pro uses. on console you have
| default high graphics. all serious players migrate to pc.
|
| the game will run on beater laptops, but it's not a great
| experience. the players i'm targeting all have desktop
| pcs and 1080p240 monitors already. if i can get 1% of 1%
| of fortnite ranked players to try, that would be
| inglorious. if it's just me haning out with 99 aws
| servers, that's fine too.
|
| i want there to be an on ramp for new players, but
| optimizing for low end spec is not a goal. especially
| with 100 players all standing next to each other, low end
| hardware falls over. will probably have to limit to 50 or
| even fewer players depending on how much low end hardware
| shows up to play.
|
| input cheats are common on console for fortnite, i'm not
| sure about other games. reads video from hdmi, mitm
| controller outputs. multiple generations of that, some of
| it works on pc too, and then pc has a whole new host of
| similar tech.
|
| input provenance is the only real solution that i can
| see. the rest is shadows on a cave wall.
| maccard wrote:
| > can tell them to boot an iso, and have it preset to do
| that via kernel cmdline. owning the os means i can tune
| the network stack, the os, the kernel, anything that
| helps performance. the game itself has minimal config,
| only keybinds.
|
| I think this is an interesting idea. Lots of things we do
| are done the way they are because they've always been
| done like that. "Turn off Antivirus" has been common
| advice for PC players for as long as I can remember, this
| is a neat way to handle all of that stuff by default
| (nobody needs windows search indexing a scratch folder
| for a video game).
|
| > most importantly, it doesn't let you set graphics to
| the settings every pro uses. on console you have default
| high graphics. all serious players migrate to pc.
|
| One of the reasons people migrate to PC is _because_ of
| the customization that you're locking down.
|
| > reads video from hdmi, mitm controller outputs.
| multiple generations of that, some of it works on pc too,
| and then pc has a whole new host of similar tech.
|
| How does your system defend against a HDMI capture device
| and a USB device that pretends to be a keyboard?
| nathants wrote:
| where we are going, we don't need graphics config.
| cyberpunk and cortana will always be there, only a reboot
| away.
|
| handcam anti-cheat and the replay system is how we deal
| with non-human inputs. ranked only.
|
| in pubs, you may encounter a cheater. hopefully owning
| the whole os makes that easier to detect, but i'm not
| sure it will.
| Sceptre6 wrote:
| What an incredible testament to the lengths men can be driven
| by spite.
|
| I would like to try your game, sir. But my problem is the
| people trying to take over my computer. I am not going to solve
| that by letting you take over my computer.
|
| Let's talk system requirements- could I get away with running
| it on an old junker laptop?
| nathants wrote:
| possibly, depending on the gpu. wickedengine requires
| modernish gpu.
|
| spite was definitely a part of it. at a certain point while
| playing and watching fortnite solo build, i wondered why
| there are so many bugs and if i could fix them. i wanted to
| understand why ping advantage and storm surge have to exist.
| this game was my journey to find out. it has been a privilege
| and a joy every single day.
|
| as far as security, you're asking the right questions. the
| typical gamer showing up in my discord doesn't, so i guide
| them to them.
|
| if you boot my game, you've booted an archlinux iso. what
| could i do? i could read/wipe your disks, so you should make
| sure they are encrypted/backedup. i could probe your network.
| i could maybe even install bios level persistent malware. i
| could do anything a userspace app with admin can do.
|
| none of this is different from a windows app as soon as you
| click yes on the admin popup thingy which every multiplayer
| game needs.
|
| reboot-to-play is better, because assuming you use bitlocker,
| i can't read every file on you c drive, unlike every game
| you've installed from steam. i also can't mess up your
| windows registry, or any other os config.
|
| the reboot-to-play build process is not yet open, but soon
| will be. even then, the game binary it will download and run
| is not open.
|
| this and more is explored in the faq on the games site, let
| me know if you want more answers up there!
|
| the purpose of reboot-to-play is not to corrupt your disks.
| its purpose is to get all players into an identical state,
| for fairness, and to avoid finicky windows tweaking for
| performance. everyone's pc is a special snowflake. what we
| want for multiplayer is identical arcade machines. every time
| you boot, you're in the correct state.
|
| running software is ultimately about trust. you can trust
| epic, or riot. you can trust steam or apple to vet user
| provide apps. you can trust me.
|
| do you want to trust me? that's up to you. i would say, wait
| for launch, watch some streams and videos, and see if it
| looks fun!
|
| launching soon. working through final matchmaking issues now.
| shkkmo wrote:
| While I appreciate the lack of self promotion, I don't see
| any name or link for your project in either comment. Can
| you share one? I'm sure I'm not the only curious person.
| vuldin wrote:
| https://better.game/
| nathants wrote:
| link in bio.
| bananamerica wrote:
| That was very enjoyable.
| nathants wrote:
| welcome to the team.
| red_admiral wrote:
| DOS era "insert game disk 1 and reboot to play" vibes.
| nathants wrote:
| building an archiso, flashing it, and then booting is very
| satisfying.
|
| [x670e][~/repos/WickedEngine/Protoverse/reboot-to-
| play][better-game][us-west-2][-][master]
|
| >> bash flash.sh /dev/sda 1224736768 bytes (1.2 GB, 1.1 GiB)
| copied, 52 s, 23.3 MB/s
| rldjbpin wrote:
| very interesting approach here, but i wonder if steam _could_
| provide a way to distribute this game in its current form.
|
| maybe a generic steamos image with console-level isolation, and
| make the game steamos-only perhaps?
|
| no offense, but there might be a sliver of the pie that don't
| like cheaters but also don't mind running something as
| invasive.
| nathants wrote:
| i might distribute a usb flashing downloading thingy in
| steam, but it's not a priority.
|
| the goal is to be minimally invasive. you don't have to
| install anything!
|
| i don't fight your misconfigured pc, you don't worry about me
| scanning your c drive.
|
| nothing to install, configure, save, or lose.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| How do you stop anyone from modifying the image?
|
| Can you stop them from using DMA hacks?
|
| Can I boot the image in a VM?
| nathants wrote:
| not possible to stop modification, but i will be heavily
| surveilling the system, and i know exactly what it should
| look like. the process tree is known in advance.
|
| handcam anti-cheat and replays will handle provenance of
| inputs. non-human inputs are cheating.
|
| you could try to boot in vm, but performance will suffer. the
| server moved off vms for the same reason.
|
| the only thing i really care about is non-human inputs. if
| you get really creative with booting the game, and aren't
| nefarious, i'll set phasers to stun.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Anti-cheat is always an arms race. A modified image can
| report anything it wants to your surveillance.
|
| That said, you can win that arms race for a while by doing
| something sufficiently innovative, different and
| specialized and you may have that here. I doubt this
| approach offers a permanent solution though.
|
| Edit: I do think there is a lot to the idea of not trying
| to put all players through the same level of anti-cheat
| security. The anti-cheat needs of competitive players is
| very different from casuals and offering different levels
| of anti-cheat based on those levels. How amazing would it
| be if other games did the same and let players choose the
| level of anti-cheat to use and to require.
| nathants wrote:
| eventually gen-ai may be an issue, but we'll have to see.
| likely it will always be asymmetric, easier to detect
| than create. it will make cheating more expensive at a
| minimum, flawless live video at 1080p60 matched to game
| inputs will cost gpu time. then we turn up handcam
| fidelity. 120fps. 1440p. the sky is the limit.
|
| handcam-anticheat is ranked only. pubs has good old
| fashioned try-our-best anti-cheat. aka thoughts-and-
| prayers anti-cheat.
| bitsandboots wrote:
| Hey man I just play games to have fun. I guess fun isn't for
| everyone.
| nathants wrote:
| outlandish. i will get laws passed that require you to play
| and enjoy my game. how dare you, sir.
| CursedUrn wrote:
| Making a webcam work on every hardware configuration is very
| difficult. I don't think this is possible.
| nathants wrote:
| really? usb webcams? i suppose it's possible, but this seems
| unlikely.
|
| very well, ranked will then require specific hardware. i'm
| gonna have to build more test pcs. 9800x3d 7700xt b650m
| looking pretty clean.
| valval wrote:
| Is there a system in place for when my identical brother who is
| leagues better at your game than me hops on my account and
| proceeds to mop the floor with the competition?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| For most games these days there is thanks to skill based
| matchmaking. Your brother will be matched up with people in
| your skill bracket and will absolutely wreck them. Then
| whenever you get back on you will have moved up in skill
| thanks to big bro and will now get wrecked until you get
| tossed back into the lobbies you belong.
|
| People generally hate this though because for one it makes
| most games into way too serious sweat fest with everyone so
| closely matched. And for two it doesn't even stop the entire
| reason it was built which was to protect the noobs. The elite
| players can just tank like an nfl team for a few rounds and
| go back to stomping noobs.
| valval wrote:
| Thanks, although I was joking since I thought I was
| responding to a satirical post. Turns out OP is developing
| such game for real.
| nathants wrote:
| sbmm wouldn't fix this, as skill is at the account level and
| changes slowly.
|
| what does fix this is handcam anti-cheat, which makes it
| trivial to identify the operator by their hand movement
| patterns, arm size, etc.
|
| you can review not only the match you are in, but all
| previous matches. full fidelity replays + handcam = a brave
| new world.
|
| account sharing is not allowed in ranked. in pubs, go crazy.
| tightbookkeeper wrote:
| Cheating is a human problem. The technology just makes us feel
| in control.
|
| I will not be playing games that make me feel like a prisoner.
| The experience taking standardized tests is enough for one
| life.
| nathants wrote:
| i respect your feelings and your choice. happiness, privacy
| and security are important.
|
| there are however legions of fortnite players who would
| mortgage their lives for a better game. a handcam without
| audio during gameplay seems a more reasonable and low price
| to pay. time will tell what gamers think! very exciting.
| tightbookkeeper wrote:
| Wish you and your project well!
| nathants wrote:
| consider yourself on the team.
| jokoon wrote:
| Valve now catches cheaters using machine learning, which
| analyzes the demo. Apparently they catch a lot of cheaters this
| way, and it's more reliable than player reports.
|
| But to be really honest: it's impossible to prevent cheaters.
| The only way is to play with friends, or to change the
| incentives of the game where it becomes less interesting to
| cheat.
|
| For example, a game like counter strike will have a lot of
| cheaters because you can earn skins and sell them. There are
| also a lot of players who will buy cheats, because the game is
| just so popular.
|
| The game design and engine design can also help to prevent
| cheating.
|
| Honestly, you cannot solve corruption, you need to change the
| game or the players.
|
| In my view, the Counter strike community is quite toxic, but
| very profitable for valve, which is why they don't care if
| their players behave poorly. CS is a nice game but human nature
| is what it is. You don't find recommendable people playing CS,
| most gamers play something else because that community is just
| so terrible to interact with.
| nathants wrote:
| i'm trying to align monetization and all other incentives in
| the direction of a better game.
|
| yet cheaters will still cheat.
|
| non-human inputs IS cheating. period. there is no information
| cheating possible in this game.
|
| input provenance is the only anti cheat that has a chance.
|
| full fidelity 120hz server replays with handcam seems a good
| place to start.
|
| we'll see how it goes!
| Retr0id wrote:
| I'm booting your OS in a stealthy hypervisor and operating my
| cheat logic from there.
| nathants wrote:
| and i will award you cash from the bug bounty pool!
|
| then you will be banned from ranked, unless you have a clever
| way to synthesize perfect handcam video.
|
| in which case, you get the entire bounty pool and 10% profit
| for 6 months.
|
| then you will be banned from ranked.
|
| the bugs won't discover themselves. i salute you.
| two_handfuls wrote:
| They didn't already? O.o I thought Steam was better than that.
| steelframe wrote:
| I built a separate Arch Linux box just for Steam gaming. I will
| never log into any of my sensitive accounts -- email, banking,
| etc. -- on that machine. It's a Framework laptop so I can
| physically keep the camera and microphone disconnected. I
| basically treat it like a public terminal.
| j-bos wrote:
| This is the way.
| cascades42 wrote:
| Yep, same here. I have a dedicated gaming machine because I'm
| afraid to expose my banking information.
| nathants wrote:
| dedicated hardware is a good idea, but too expensive for many.
| dedicated os is a good first step.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Do you truly expect any steam games to have anything like a
| root kit that'd exfiltrate your credentials?
|
| I feel if this were the case literally anything I install on my
| PC would be suspect. Installing ssh would be a much more scary
| thing than a random steam game.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| No, he expects the root kit will open up his machine to
| automated worms.
| m463 wrote:
| I thought some games snooped through your system.
|
| Kerbal Space Program comes to mind, I recall it had adware
| that did this.
| Delk wrote:
| Unity has some kind of data collection that can be used for
| analytics and advertising, so you might need to opt out of
| that in a Unity game. I think that came up in KSP as well.
|
| https://unity.com/legal/game-player-and-app-user-privacy-
| pol...
|
| https://unity.com/legal/game-player-and-app-user-privacy-
| faq
| westpfelia wrote:
| The concern is that malicious actors can take advantage of
| what is certainly a poorly written rootkit.
| gspetr wrote:
| >Do you truly expect any steam games to have anything like a
| root kit that'd exfiltrate your credentials?
|
| https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/steam-game-
| mo...
|
| "Downfall, a fan expansion for the popular Slay the Spire
| indie strategy game, was breached on Christmas Day to push
| Epsilon information stealer malware using the Steam update
| system.
|
| Once installed on a compromised computer, the malware will
| collect cookies and saved passwords and credit cards from web
| browsers (Google Chrome, Yandex, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla
| Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi), as well as Steam and Discord info.
|
| It will also look for documents containing 'password' in the
| filenames and for more credentials, including the local
| Windows login and Telegram."
| maccard wrote:
| That's not a steam game, that's a user mod (read: random
| binary downloaded from the internet and executed). Also, it
| doesn't need kernel level access to do any of that stuff,
| it can get by just fine with normal application level
| permissions.
|
| This is no different to downloading a random binary off the
| internet and being surprised it's malicious.
| remnantdiving wrote:
| patched: https://hackerone.com/reports/470520
| https://hackerone.com/reports/1070835
| https://secret.club/2021/04/20/source-engine-rce-
| invite.html https://secret.club/2020/10/30/alien-swarm-
| rce.html https://threatpost.com/dark-souls-servers-down-
| rce-bug/17789... https://blog.thalium.re/posts/achieving-
| remote-code-executio... https://www.pcgamer.com/garrys-
| mod-cough-virus-is-cured-but-...
|
| you can buy these games in their unpatched state today,
| and download a poc for them from github too:
| https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-10718
| https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-20817
|
| frankly playing video games on a dedicated device and
| network is the reasonable response to reading this shit
| keyringlight wrote:
| I've been wondering is how long before we get a 'PC-
| console' dedicated gaming device, there's certain aspects
| where PC is falling into the gravity well of the console
| model. Whether that's the technical aspects like how far
| you can lock down for security (and who's security) or
| DRM, whether people only want a nice front end, whether
| everything should be managed by a defacto 'good' platform
| holder versus allowing companies to do their own thing
| (clients or commerce). At some point such a thing looks
| like a more expensive ultra-pro console.
|
| Then that has to be balanced against the freedom aspect
| where people want flexibility to build a workstation how
| they want and do what they want on it, and expecting it
| all to work (windows games being supported on non-windows
| is a more common issue now). PC casts the broadest net
| and catches a lot of different desires, similar with how
| high-end and low-end seem to be splitting over the past
| ~5 years rather than being a continuous spectrum I wonder
| if there will be distinct types of PC for gaming (eg set
| models like the old Commodore Amiga) or if trying to
| resist splits does more harm than good.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Speaking for myself, I would never buy such a thing. The
| reason I game on PC is because I need a decent PC for
| work anyway, so building one that can also game is
| cheaper than buying a console.
|
| If I was _really_ concerned about security I 'd sooner
| dual boot into a second OS that had nothing on it, than
| buy a second box just to game on.
| keyringlight wrote:
| Yep, a lot of this comes down to "who's security" and
| what everyone can take as a foundation to build trust
| upon, or what their thresholds are
| shkkmo wrote:
| That's what "steam deck" is. A dedicated gaming device
| that is still also a general purpose computer that you
| have full control over.
| steelframe wrote:
| > root kit that'd exfiltrate your credentials
|
| Yes. I truly believe some janky random anti-cheat kernel
| module could very well capture telemetry about my keystrokes
| to a log and then send that log off to a server.
|
| At the very least I don't trust that it's secure enough to be
| in the kernel of a machine for which I require any degree of
| trust in its integrity.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| I don't expect that. I expect that publicly traded companies
| will cut corners in developing their kernel extension (like
| always), turning them into literal root kits waiting for
| anyone willing to exploit them.
|
| See:
| https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/22/h/ransomware-
| ac...
| rldjbpin wrote:
| at that rate why bother using arch for the box? unless you
| never touch online multiplayer games, i can understand that it
| probably works for you.
| gradientsrneat wrote:
| I've heard good things about the Framework laptops from a
| modularity perspective, but how are the thermals? Can it have a
| dedicated GPU?
| m463 wrote:
| so anti-cheat, but not drm?
| WatchDog wrote:
| With the way that computer vision and AI continue to improve, I
| imagine that we will soon have completely external and
| undetectable cheating peripherals, simply capture the screen
| direct from the display output, and pass inputs via mimicking a
| usb human input device.
|
| This won't provide all the same capabilities as cheats that hook
| into the game process, such as wall hacks, but it would be
| possible to build a super human aimbot with such an approach.
|
| We already have external "radar" cheats that use the game stereo
| sound to give the direction that a certain sound(such as
| footsteps) came from.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| That kind of stuff is readily available right now with openCV.
| Image detection has been very good and very fast for a long
| time!
|
| Nobody really cares because most players are honest and play to
| have fun.
| aenis wrote:
| But why bother with image recognition? And pay a heavy
| latency penalty which makes it difficult to implement PID-
| style controls on player's aim? Its a game of milliseconds
| and opencv is comparably slow, as is the I/O involved.
|
| Far easier to do a MiTM on the network traffic and recreate
| state in another process.
|
| Still easier to clone memory pages used by the target app, or
| use hardware that allows dma.
| musjleman wrote:
| > With the way that computer vision and AI continue to improve,
| I imagine that we will soon have completely external and
| undetectable cheating peripherals, simply capture the screen
| direct from the display output, and pass inputs via mimicking a
| usb human input device.
|
| This already exists. You can stream your screen to another
| machine running image recognition and pass your mouse input
| through a controller that injects auxiliary input (there are
| off-the-shelf products like kmbox, you can make your own as
| well).
|
| However, it is very important to understand that only a tiny
| percentage of cheaters in games end up being determined enough
| to go through hoops to purchase hardware for it (it's much more
| expensive and not as simple as getting instant gratification by
| double clicking on an executable). It's basically considered a
| win to push people into needing go to such lengths to cheat
| without getting banned.
| Dibby053 wrote:
| For hacks that don't access program memory directly, would
| external hardware make things less detectable? I don't know
| how anti-cheat programs work but I'd be surprised if they
| banned every skilled player that happens to be running AHK
| and OBS. More likely they work with heuristics that try to
| detect super-human mouse movements, precision/speed-wise.
| maccard wrote:
| > For hacks that don't access program memory directly,
| would external hardware make things less detectable?
|
| Yes. But, it's a game of cat and mouse. Anticheat always
| is. There's not been a need go to the level of "there are X
| players who report having a Razer deathadder, which we've
| validated as having a DPI range of Y-Z. With your OS
| settings, it's not possible to have achieved that with that
| mouse therefore we suspect you of cheating". But we're
| probably there now.
|
| > More likely they work with heuristics that try to detect
| super-human mouse movements, precision/speed-wise.
|
| It's heurestics all the way down. You're _unlikely_ to be
| banned for AHK+OBS, but a heurestic on what you 're doing
| with the combo might ban you.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| And all of that for something that is worse - software cheats
| usually get access to more information than just the pixels
| rendered to the screen. Seeing through solid walls and stuff
| like that.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| You can do DMA cheating if that's a non-negotiable for you
| but it is far more expensive. You install a direct memory
| access (DMA) card on your "clean" machine and flash it with
| firmware that hides the fact that it's a DMA card since
| some rootkit level anticheats will look for that.
|
| The card then sends memory data to a second computer
| (dirty) which has the cheat software installed but no
| rootkit anticheat. The dirty computer can then read all the
| memory it wants, look through walls, shows enemy health,
| etc. but on a second computer and monitor. Pretty sure
| there's hardware to blend both monitor outputs, though most
| people do two monitors I believe.
| musjleman wrote:
| > You can do DMA cheating if that's a non-negotiable for
| you but it is far more expensive.
|
| Cheap DMA cards go for couple hundred dollars which isn't
| all that much. Although unlike what most people tend to
| believe, the DMA cards do end up getting detected quite
| often.
|
| > Pretty sure there's hardware to blend both monitor
| outputs, though most people do two monitors I believe.
|
| It's called a "fuser".
| ackbar03 wrote:
| are there out-of-the-box software tools to do this?
|
| I thought about something like this before, but its non-
| trivial to train an image recognition system to do this, let
| alone the commands to mimic it through hardware, its quite an
| engineering feat in itself.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > However, it is very important to understand that only a
| tiny percentage of cheaters in games end up being determined
| enough to go through hoops to purchase hardware for it
|
| Today. That will change when it's a cheap off-the-shelf
| product sold on Amazon. I almost wish we were there already
| to get rid of this KLA nonsense.
|
| Not to mention, every KLA game I've played has had cheaters
| regardless. Circumventing the software seems to become a game
| unto itself for those people.
| mrtksn wrote:
| In other words, tech based solutions to human problems always
| fails at some point probably because the problem creators can
| also use tech.
| jmorenoamor wrote:
| That would make an awesome competition field for AI bots that
| rely only on video/audio input and mouse/keyboard output.
| reginald78 wrote:
| > We already have external "radar" cheats that use the game
| stereo sound to give the direction that a certain sound(such as
| footsteps) came from.
|
| Did you just imply my headphones are a cheating device?
|
| More seriously, I've heard these type of devices already exist.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| I once played some Hunt (difficult, highly competitive game,
| a little like CS) with people on ex professional level. They
| obviously had gaming PCs, but they ALL had super expensive 7?
| Channels headphones. It's apparently a thing among ex pro (or
| high level) Counter-Strike players to have these super
| headphones that let you know where people are before regular
| people can hear them.
|
| They hushed me all the time because "someone's coming". Still
| a fun experience - to win for a change. Don't have to add
| that my role was more as a decoy then anything else.
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _Why anti-cheat software utilizes kernel drivers (2020)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42001030 - Oct 2024 (50
| comments)
| imchillyb wrote:
| Locks & picks.
|
| This is the war. It's always been the war. It will always be the
| war. Digital changed the medium but war, war never changes.
|
| The war in unwinnable in any real sense of the word win. However,
| security does not need to be impenetrable security only needs to
| dissuade the attacker.
|
| Kernel level, blah-blah-blah, doesn't dissuade cheaters. Those
| things dissuade legitimate users. It's never the ideology that
| dissuades those users though as they don't know or care. What
| dissuades these users are the difficulties that these systems
| present to the uninformed user.
|
| The typical end user doesn't know how to 'fix-it' when things go
| wrong. PC vendors won't support the issue. The game publisher
| won't support the issue. The game developer rarely supports the
| issue. Kernel level blah-blah-blah causes a blah-blah-blah.
| Nobody wants to hear it. Nobody wants to fix it.
|
| And, to top off this defecation-confection, the user is left with
| software that they paid for and cannot use or access. No refunds.
| Sorry. And, and, and!!! There are still cheaters on the platform.
| Every platform. There's your f'n cherry.
|
| This is bad for the entire industry.
| jeff_carr wrote:
| > This is bad for the entire industry.
|
| This is Microsoft continuing to demonize free software and
| Linux. If they actually cared, they would support an open
| source solution to the problem. SOMETHING THEY ABSOLUTELY
| OPPOSE. That is the core issue. Say it over and over, Microsoft
| _DOES NOT WANT A SOLUTION TO THESE PROBLEMS_.
| juliangmp wrote:
| They need to disclose when they want to install malware on my
| system? About time if you ask me...
| wiz21c wrote:
| > kernel-level anti-cheat
|
| Add UEFI on your PC and DRM in your browser.
|
| And next, your governement will ask you to add its anti pedo-
| pornography tools.
|
| And then we have a new episode of Black Mirror...
| M95D wrote:
| UEFI is here, browser DRM for video is here, browser DRM for
| text+ads on ordinary web pages is just around the corner,
| government won't ask anyone - the tools will be added at the
| ISP level, if they're not already installed and operational.
| dartharva wrote:
| > government won't ask anyone
|
| Wishful thinking. That government hasn't asked anyone yet (at
| least in public information) is a miracle in itself.
| M95D wrote:
| You didn't understand my meaning: Government never asks. It
| just does things whether you agree or not.
| proaralyst wrote:
| What's your problem with UEFI? If your OEM wanted to install
| malicious firmware they can do that in BIOS no?
| ho_schi wrote:
| First step.
|
| Second step?
|
| Ban games with kernel-level anti-cheat.
|
| It is not acceptable on Linux. Apple will also not accept that
| shit further, that said Apple lost relevance in gaming with
| Mantle and the M-Processors (both mean a lot of incompatibility).
| And Microsoft is regretting every choice in this regard:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24242947/microsoft-window...
|
| But that is a usual pattern. Microsoft makes bad decisions and
| everyone suffers. Even Linux. Their is a reason why closed-source
| kernel modules mark Linux as _tainted_ , the system is not
| trustworthy.
|
| It is the duty of game developers to secure their games
| themselves. Not manipulating user devices. Forcefully doing
| stupid and dangerous things because you cannot achieve your task
| in a safe why is not a reason.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| The reason games companies reach for KLA is not because they're
| dumb and can't be bothered to secure their network protocols on
| the server side, it's because they don't want to have to hire
| an inordinate number of human reviewers to make unreliable
| decisions on whether someone is cheating or not in their game.
|
| While KLA is fundamentally flawed (DMA and even CV based cheats
| are becoming more popular as a result of KLA and they still
| give cheaters a significant (but now even harder to detect)
| advantage) it solves the problem of obvious and even most kinds
| of subtle cheating.
|
| Attempting to detect cheating once inputs are being sent to
| your server (which is within your domain of control and on
| which you can implement non-intrusive anti-cheat) is very
| difficult to do reliably. An inexperienced player will make
| slow, delayed inputs. A highly experienced player will have
| reactions which are an order of magnitude faster (and in many
| cases faster than the speed of thought because of muscle
| memory). If you want to make a working but no longer detectable
| cheat, all you need to do is spend a bit of time and effort
| programming in human limits of reaction time into all your code
| and making sure all inputs look realistic (again, more limits).
|
| At the end of the day, you can make a cheat which gives you a
| significant advantage without it being actually detectable by
| any statistical methods on the server.
|
| At this point you might attempt to reach for AI but undoubtedly
| that will require human oversight or you will get false
| positives.
|
| So, in summary, even if you were to design your game around
| server-side rendering and server-side input processing, forcing
| your players to effectively play over a remote desktop
| connection (which is impractical for any fast paced competitive
| multiplayer game due to latency issues but let's pretend those
| don't exist for a minute), you will still get cheaters with
| snap-to-head or recoil compensation or auto-fire making a
| significant impact on games. Heck, there's even the idea of
| using sounds (which need to be pretty accurate so human players
| can utilise them to determine where enemy players are) to
| implement a rudimentary wallhack.
|
| This is just the nature of FPS games and why games companies
| end up implementing KLA for these games. The way to make an FPS
| game un-cheatable is to make a different game where cheating is
| more difficult or impossible just by nature of the format.
|
| Want FPS without cheaters? Encourage people to do DIY
| matchmaking again, DIY server hosting and DIY administration.
| Except that "this doesn't scale". Neither does human review.
| Neither does server side rendering. The core reasons why game
| companies do KLA is that players will pay for games with KLA
| but won't pay for games without it. As much as I think
| Microsoft is one of the worst companies in existence, in this
| case I don't think they or KLA developers are to blame. KLA
| developers are simply doing what players want them to do and
| Microsoft is only allowing what their end-users want them to
| allow. If Microsoft removes KLA, it will be by replacing it
| with userspace code with hardware attestation support, it won't
| be by killing the concept of intrusive anti-cheat. All
| Microsoft is doing is trying to re-design the tools to cover
| their own ass.
|
| Fundamentally, KLA has pushed cheating further into DMA and CV
| territory. This means that more obvious and annoying forms of
| cheating, undetectable by KLA are probably going to soon become
| more common. At this point the options are to have these games
| be console-only with blessed hardware and hardware attestation.
| And even that has flaws (as described). Eventually it will just
| be impossible to play a game in a public server without
| cheating. Maybe this will force people away from these types of
| games, or towards private lobbies. I don't know what the future
| holds here.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > Want FPS without cheaters? Encourage people to do DIY
| matchmaking again, DIY server hosting and DIY administration.
|
| Yes. This is the answer. There is no solution that relies
| only on technology that will fix human problems at scale. You
| can make it harder, but once one person figures it out,
| everyone has access to it. You need to break it into pieces
| and let people deal with it on the community level, where
| communities are small enough that people can deal with
| individuals.
|
| The main issue is that 'at scale' you have the fact that a
| certain percentage of people are sociopaths, a certain
| percentage of people are really smart, and a certain
| percentage of people have the time and motivation to do
| something, and when they all cross you end up with a person
| who breaks your system.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| > Yes. This is the answer. There is no solution that relies
| only on technology that will fix human problems at scale.
| You can make it harder, but once one person figures it out,
| everyone has access to it. You need to break it into pieces
| and let people deal with it on the community level, where
| communities are small enough that people can deal with
| individuals.
|
| The issue is that the players themselves seem to think that
| the convenience of KLA (over running your own community,
| paying for your own servers, etc) outweighs the privacy
| risks.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > The issue is that the players themselves seem to think
| that the convenience of KLA (over running your own
| community, paying for your own servers, etc) outweighs
| the privacy risks.
|
| That's not true and there isn't data to show it.
|
| The reasons why support for community run servers have
| fallen by the wayside are more complicated than "players
| chose one over the other and companies followed them".
|
| Companies also recognized significant downsides for
| themselves of community run servers. When your online
| experience is in community run spaces, you expose your
| player base to experiences outside of your control. When
| you don't run your own server instances, you can't
| enforce the cheating rules you want. These, among many
| other reason, make it harder and more risky to monetize
| the online experience of your game. A such, the choice
| was generally taken away from players to protect
| companies. This wasn't at all a pure reaction to player
| preference.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Really? Most gaming communities seem to hate kla as it
| breaks their steam deck compatibility or linux
| compatibility.
| raincole wrote:
| Most players don't use Steam Deck or Linux.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| It's only the answer if the goal is to not feel like you're
| being cheated by cheaters: realistically cheating would be
| absolutely fucking bonkers if you actually tried to treat
| DIY matchmaking as a form anti-cheat.
|
| Voting to kick/ban and sharing ban lists only works for
| ragehacking, but the most joy stealing form of cheating is
| people using hacks and cheats subtly enough to beat an
| average player, but not strongly enough to guarantee
| they'll be caught by the community.
| immibis wrote:
| How's that any different from just having a really good
| player in your community - which, in many cases, _also_
| spoils the fun?
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Are you seriously asking me how getting killed by someone
| cheating to know exactly where you are feels different
| than just being outplayed?
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Actually yes.
|
| If you've never been falsely accused of cheating in an
| online game by people who can't tell the difference
| between that and getting outplayed, chances are you
| haven't played any multiplayer games long enough to get
| any good at them.
| tl wrote:
| The only real answer for this is self-imposed handicaps.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| You'd end up pretty awful at games if you treated getting
| killed by something that has no counterplay the same as
| getting killed by something that does...
|
| A person who's good enough to know where you are for in-
| game reasons is something you supposed to learn to
| respond to: They aren't cheating so they're using
| heuristics and information that you're supposed to learn
| to counter play.
|
| A person who has omniscience at the press of a button
| does not play similarly at all. Often times that's how
| they're even caught: since they're not bound by any sort
| of in game heuristics no counterplays work against them.
|
| -
|
| In some games that even makes cheaters a liability when
| they're on your team. With any ranked game mode "soft
| cheating" will result in them climbing to a rank where
| non-cheaters have all sorts of great heuristics on how to
| play that they lack. So without ragehacking they're
| actually at a disadvantage and either need to get
| increasingly bold with cheats or lose.
|
| In some games that's transformed into another way
| cheaters ruin modern competitive games: intentionally de-
| ranking so they'll play against less mechanically sound
| players who are easier to cheat against.
| amiga386 wrote:
| I don't think anyone is saying "DIY matchmaking", they're
| saying "community servers" - and everyone in any given
| community knows everyone else, ideally IRL, and any
| newcomers are going to be watched, both for their
| technical performance but also their social performance.
|
| Cheating among your friends has the ultimate death
| penalty of losing those friendships. Most people don't
| want that.
|
| This is why most cheating is not among close friends, but
| where there's an open buffet for the energy vampires;
| anodyne corporate "matchmaking" where the game
| corporation will place you with other customers of the
| game corporation at its choice. The cheater does not have
| to face a panel of their peers, they only have to slip
| past the inattentive corporation to be placed in a server
| with delicious innocent strangers who they will never see
| again once they've had their fun.
| porkbrain wrote:
| Equating cheaters to energy vampires is great comedy, I'm
| stealing that.
|
| I'd love to see Colin Robinson play CS 1.6 with wallhack
| in his basement.
| aenis wrote:
| And fundamentally, the anti-cheat software is fighting a
| loosing game because of some quirks of x86:
|
| - hardware breakpoints on memory latch to logical, not
| physical addresses - one can map the same area of physical
| memory to different logical addresses thus allowing arbitrary
| memory reads - simulating inputs through the PnP stack can be
| made indetectible with polymorphic code doing the injections
| - detecting the aimbot's core code can be prevented via at
| least two methods: triggering (and capturing) page faults on
| memory hosting the bot or, again, with polymorphic code
| generation
|
| One could create a fully open source cheat engine relying on
| memory reads and input injection via the pnp stavk and it
| would be undetectable deterministically (with heuristics,
| sure).
|
| Games - unless streamed - need to know a bit more about the
| world they display than the player is allowed to see. Some
| engines I analysed (years ago) tried to limit propagating
| data to the local client to only a portion of the map and
| close proximity (the more recent battlefield games, if memory
| serves), while lots still have all enemy coordinates at all
| times in memory, some even with debug symbols to help the
| poor aimbot community reverse memory structures that more
| easily.
|
| Its hopeless. The only winning move is not to play :-)
| Hercuros wrote:
| I suppose the memory being mapped twice could be detected
| by anti-cheat though. You can then also make more
| mitigations to prevent detection of the mapping (e.g.
| hooking the syscall to check the active mappings), but it's
| always a cat and mouse game.
| aenis wrote:
| You are right on the first point, but I don't think you
| are right on the syscall part - a kernel level module can
| just read the PT directly without resorting to a syscall,
| no? You get access to CR3, and besides kernel-level PTs
| have a fixed logical (and if memory serves, physical -
| though maybe just on windows) address.
|
| When in the non-PAE mode, I think one can still
| practically trigger page faults on attempted reads on the
| PDEs mapped by a kernel-level aimbot, force flushing of
| TLBs when anti-cheat tries to read the PT, and
| effectively conceal the cloning (although if the anti-
| cheat is doing this often enough, the performance impact
| might be too much?).
|
| When in PAE mode, I do not know of a practical way to do
| it, but I haven't been researching such exploits for a
| few years now.
|
| I think at this point, the most practical way to
| implement an open-source, undetectable aimbot proof-of-
| concept would be to perform static reversing of the game
| engine to get the network protocol, peform a MITM to
| listen in and recreate state on a separate process or
| machine, do a PnP input injection via a real or fake
| mouse/keyboard.
|
| Reversing the code (as opposed to memory structures) is
| very hard these days, though, and not because of anti-
| cheat software, but because of the high-end anti-piracy
| runtimes and layers upon layers of abstractions which are
| annoying to analyze in assembly. (But sure, not
| impossible, and I am sure people are doing this
| considering the crazy amounts people are willing to pay
| for private aimbots).
|
| For a system programming geek its all very interesting
| and intellectually stimulating, but boy does it ruin the
| fun of multiplayer gaming :-( I think the best way to
| protect against cheaters would be to run streaming-only
| servers where all the processing happens server-side.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Realistically if you make a game hack where it behaves
| exactly as well as a high skilled player, no one should care.
| The lobby experience is the same as if you got a really good
| player in there. When people moan about hackers its when they
| are blatant. Dominating the entire server and obviously
| hacking when you spectate them. If you take away all this low
| hanging fruit who cares about the people who are cheating
| within statistical variance of player skill?
| Arch-TK wrote:
| I think people happen not to care as long as they don't
| know, but if they were made aware then they would care.
| Games companies rely on the fact that people don't care if
| they don't know because it means they _only_ have to rely
| on KLA to get rid of most people with trashy spinbots.
| dartharva wrote:
| > Second step
|
| > "Ban games with kernel-level anti-cheat."
|
| > "It is the duty of game developers"
|
| It's hilarious that people actually think the publishers will
| ever have two hoots to give about notions like that. FWIW I
| agree we'd all be better off without those things but the
| entitlement to believe private businesses should run on _your_
| personal whims and that developers have a "duty" to make
| things only as _you_ prefer is gobsmacking. I am always left in
| wonder what commenters like this think about themselves.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| I agree that profit driven companies will never ever care
| about the morality or the safety or the social impacts of
| their choices.
|
| I don't think, however, that "publishers would use disabled
| children slave labor if they could" is really an argument you
| ought to make.
| rmholt wrote:
| I would make that argument
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/02/11/child-
| lab...
| moffkalast wrote:
| That's right, they won't care. That's why any action will
| only come if Valve bans the practice from their store,
| because losing money is all publishers understand.
|
| Every publisher that's greedily taken their products off
| Steam in an attempt to recuperate Valve's fee has sooner or
| later come crawling back because they weren't able to make a
| half usable platform to sell their stuff on. Valve holds a
| really large influence over the industry.
| wrren wrote:
| That's an incredibly naive perspective. KLA represents a real
| risk to companies, as something going wrong can crash player
| computers instead of just game processes; this is a PR
| nightmare if/when it happens on a large scale. Not to mention
| the cost of hiring engineers capable of building kernel
| components in the first place, it's a niche skillset that's not
| cheap to hire for.
|
| Games companies don't turn to KLA out of laziness, it's out of
| absolute necessity, especially for games like FPS' where it's
| impossible to fully secure the game using pure server-side
| methods. Machine learning has been tried, it's too prone to
| false positives and misses more subtle cheats that still
| negativel impact the the player experience. Anti-Cheat used to
| exist purely in user mode and then, guess what?, cheats moved
| into the kernel where they couldn't be detected or stopped.
| Anti-cheat had to follow in order to remain effective.
|
| The alternative was conceding the space to cheaters and
| watching games that players love, and that required massive
| resources to develop and maintain, degenerate into a hellscape
| of cheating that real players refuse to play.
| ikety wrote:
| I'd believe this if every multiplayer game that doesn't have
| KLA was just rife with cheaters. Also, why is EA adding KLA
| to Battlefield 1 almost a decade after release?
|
| I refuse to believe there is only one simple honorable
| objective when it comes to KLA. I simply do not care if
| companies can't figure out how to stop cheaters without it.
| What about our experience? You might complain about cheaters,
| but what if I can't even play the game because of KLA?
|
| Played plenty of recent MP games on Linux just fine and
| cheating was never experience breaking.
| jakebasile wrote:
| We had the best alternative decades ago. Let the community
| run the servers and ban cheaters while allowing individual
| servers to form their own culture and community. The
| obsession with matchmaking and games as a service (requiring
| publisher run servers) is what painted the industry into this
| corner.
|
| Note that I like matchmaking, specifically skill based
| matchmaking, in some games and at some times but completely
| ending server browsers and community run dedicated servers
| was a mistake.
| notabee wrote:
| But then it's harder to shim in the money-makers like
| microtransactions, loot boxes, and all the other recent
| "innovations" in the gaming industry.
| xvinci wrote:
| I was pretty good at CS:S, semi-professional level. I
| nevertheless still enjoyed hanging out on public servers
| with friends. I cannot tell you how often I have just been
| banned.
|
| Another example: I was an anti-cheat admin in a major
| league about 20 years ago. I am quite confident a lower
| double digit percentage of banned players were innocent -
| it was simply too hard to get enough competent people for
| doing manual checks (you'd have to be really good at the
| game yourself to confidently tell what might be intuition
| and what cant while evaluating pro players with money-
| prizes on the line).
|
| So while I appreciate that sentiment, and maybe you found
| THE one community where all that really worked out for you,
| but it was by no means the "best alternative" from where I
| am standing.
| jakebasile wrote:
| As I said, offering both is the ideal. I'd rather have
| some false positives if it means a way forward without
| kernel rootkits becoming the new normal.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| Until the obviously detectable cheaters like spinbots get
| INSTANTLY banned, I don't believe for a second they've "tried
| everything".
|
| If hackers have to limit themselves to behaviour that looks
| like real skill, it's kind of unimportant to the games
| community if they're cheating. Cheaters only ruin the
| experience if they're obvious to the player.
|
| Finally, something like Overwatch in CS, together with paid
| employees and PUBLIC bans of high paying cheater accounts
| (including hardware bans) would create a chilling effect,
| further forcing cheaters into hiding.
| montagg wrote:
| > The alternative was conceding the space to cheaters and
| watching games that players love, and that required massive
| resources to develop and maintain, degenerate into a
| hellscape of cheating that real players refuse to play.
|
| This was a key reason for Valorant's success. Anti-cheat is a
| necessary evil to make online games fair. I think if someone
| wants to suggest otherwise, they would need to demonstrate a
| superior solution. Companies truly _do not want_ to be in the
| business of messing with your kernel, so if another solution
| exists--one that is actually superior in cheat detection and
| prevention--without a kernel extension, they 'll do it.
|
| I'll provide another example of why companies would rather
| not do it unless they have to. Kernel extensions usually
| require a system restart. Requiring a restart adds a huge
| drop off point to a conversion funnel and costs the game some
| amount of players who may have stuck around, and some
| players, like the ones here who are upset about it, won't
| even bother because they are outright opposed. Games would
| gobble up a solution that worked and didn't have that
| baggage.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| > tainted, the system is not trustworthy.
|
| I wonder what is worth more: the median installation of a free-
| to-play multiplayer game, or access to everything they do on
| that PC?
|
| I won't be the first one to wonder this.
| WithinReason wrote:
| Hope there will be a tag. I wish they also had a tag for
| "requires third party account" so I could just filter those games
| out so I never see them.
| paledot wrote:
| Tags are crowdsourced. I was tagging games with "always-online
| DRM" before they declared it on the store page, but only the
| top few tags are displayed, so there's no point.
| SXX wrote:
| They also editable by developers / publishers and it's by
| design. Any sane developer prune their tags from time to time
| since Steam recommendations depend on them.
|
| So it's not exactly a reasonable place to put something like
| that.
| sphars wrote:
| I use the Augmented Steam extension[0], which shows a more
| prominent banner if a game has DRM, anti-cheat, requires a
| third-party account, or other gotchas. Plus a bunch of other
| useful features
|
| [0]: https://github.com/IsThereAnyDeal/AugmentedSteam
| nithssh wrote:
| Makes sense considering Valve has maintained that kernel level AC
| is not required and has not included one in their own games, but
| let's be honest, unfortunately you have to often wonder if your
| enemy is having a good day or if he's hacking in CS but not so in
| valorant for a reason.
| ixwt wrote:
| I'm also hearing a bunch of grumblings and speculation that
| Valve is developing a non kernel level anti cheat.
| nithssh wrote:
| They have VAC and the newer version that they promised would
| save CS2 hasn't exactly changed much from CSGO days in terms
| of results.
|
| I would love for Valve to prove it is possible but so far
| they haven't shown it can be done without leaving a bad
| experience for legit players (due to delayed ban waves, etc)
| despite the repeated claims.
| gnuser wrote:
| Im annoyed at all the servile responses in defense of these bad
| companies.
|
| Wanna hear my conspiracy theory?
|
| Three letter agencies are using games as an intel gathering tool,
| and KLA is part of that. What if the CEOs are getting NSLs, etc?
| jokoon wrote:
| what if they do? does that bother you?
| donatj wrote:
| Has anyone made a game where cheating is not just explicitly
| allowed but is in fact _the game_? It really seems like there
| could be something there.
| figgis wrote:
| Unsure if anyone has made a game specifically for that. But
| there are plenty of intentionally unsecure servers (no VAC, or
| other anti-cheat) in games like counter strike for Hacker vs
| Hacker.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| Whenever there's community servers, hack v. hack servers are
| bound to follow. For integral game mechanics? There's almost
| always a mechanic balancing anything hack adjacent.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| So, I'm not really into online multiplayer, but from a distance I
| keep wondering if this could be more easily mitigated by altering
| the incentive structure?
|
| What if online games track how well people do and sort them into
| tiers based on skill level? And then put people who are roughly
| evenly matched together. I am guessing that cheaters will
| naturally end up clumping together with each other, and maybe a
| smattering of elite players who are good enough that they can
| hold their own, and maybe even benefit from the added challenge.
| And also, casual and less-skilled players can play together and
| not get dominated so much.
|
| I don't think it would end cheating. But perhaps it would
| mitigate it by reducing a lot of the potential upside. Assuming
| the upside for many cheaters is that they enjoy feeling like they
| can dominate a server full of non-cheaters.
| JambalayaJimbo wrote:
| Skilled players will NOT benefit from playing with others who
| are cheating, because their games will adapt to cheaters and
| not other skilled players.
|
| Cheaters will also easily adapt to ranking systems by creating
| new accounts or intentionally de-ranking themselves.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Are the skilled players plugged into communities enough that
| they can just make their own servers? It would be some extra
| work, but I assume time spent getting to know each other
| wouldn't feel like a total waste, and might be greatly
| preferable to dealing with all these rootkits.
| stonogo wrote:
| KLA isn't about preventing cheaters. It's about protecting the
| artificial scarcity of products for sale via microtransaction.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Gotcha. So you're saying that it's really about protecting a
| revenue model with pay-to-win elements?
|
| If that's so, then do we typically only see KLA on games that
| are mostly funded by microtransactions or live service
| models?
| stonogo wrote:
| Pay-to-win isn't really the issue so much as
| microtransactions in general. Most of these games have an
| in-game currency to buy stuff (some is pay-to-win, most are
| cosmetics) and protecting that currency (and the virtual
| goods traded on the market it drives) is paramount. These
| games also tend to have moved away from 'community hosted'
| servers, since these give an opportunity for hosters to
| hack in features that might be detrimental to sanctioned
| behavior.
|
| In short, we typically see KLA on games with in-game
| currencies whose servers are controlled by the vendors.
|
| Inasmuch as KLA is actually used as anti-cheat software,
| it's usually a proxy for actual moderation (i.e. labor).
| Community-hosted servers generally develop their own
| processes and customs for handling bad actors, but vendors
| generally don't want to hand that kind of power to internet
| strangers.
| wigl wrote:
| As someone who plays a lot of online multiplayer, there's a few
| issues. A lot of games do have skill based matchmaking systems
| (aka SBMM) in place.
|
| Ideally, this would lead to people having a 50% win rate which
| is just unacceptable to some. Those people resort to smurfing
| or cheating to get their fix--they don't really want a fair and
| equal match. Just look to the Call of Duty community crying
| about SBMM. Those people want to farm clips and play with those
| worse than them--not people at or above their skill level.
|
| Additionally, many multiplayer games at all but the highest
| skill levels have most matches determined by the side that
| plays the fewest number of mistakes. This is especially true of
| team based games. At most skill levels, both teams will be
| making many obvious (and less obvious) mistakes. This can
| frustrate some who believe that they're held back by their team
| and just need to play with higher ranked teammates. So people
| will boost or buy accounts or resort to cheating.
| raincole wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure if you're being sarcastic or not.
|
| > What if online games track how well people do and sort them
| into tiers based on skill level?
|
| Games have been already doing this for at least a decade. Games
| that do this are exactly the games where cheating is rampant.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Honest question. Believe it or not, people who aren't into
| AAA multiplayer games don't necessarily know a whole lot
| about them.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| This is called "Skill based matchmaking" and it is absolutely
| something that many games already do. Studies have shown that
| it increases player retention significantly. But also, there's
| a chunk of people who _absolutely_ hate on it at every
| opportunity.
|
| Cheating happens regardless.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I haven't been a hardcore gamer in nearly 2 decades (think Half-
| Life, original CS), so forgive the ignorance; but why do game
| publishers care whether users cheat? I mean it's not like it
| costs them money--you're buying the game either way. I guess
| maybe in a MOOG it ruins the experience for other players if you
| show up with a gazzilion resources, but other than those games,
| so what if you leveled up quickly? why spend dev effort on trying
| to stop it?
| ultrafez wrote:
| People might not buy a game if they don't think they'll get a
| fair play experience.
| plutoh28 wrote:
| A game that is overrun by cheaters makes it less fun to regular
| players. If regular players don't want to play your game, it
| ends up being a hacker circle jerk before the servers stop
| getting consistent players at which point the game is dead. And
| a dead game is not interesting to potential buyers which
| affects the publishers revenue stream.
| Kapura wrote:
| I know there are large multiplayer shooters that have or are
| going to be moving off of Linux soon. Anecdotally, the percentage
| of linux users running cheat software is significant, north of
| 50% in some cases.
|
| Ultimately, I sympathize with game developers trying to create a
| good, _consistent_ experience for players across multiplayer
| titles. The reason players accept anticheat software in large mp
| games is because the alternative is worse.
| LelouBil wrote:
| I think I saw on HN a while ago someone suggesting that Valve
| could make a "clean kernel" build that anti cheats could
| whitelist for Linux/Proton games.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| The plan to control what a persistent cheater does to their
| own device is more than 5 decades of straight failures.
|
| Just one more client anti-cheat measure bro. Just one ring
| lower bro.
|
| I'm not sure what I find more terrifying: the persistence of
| the NSA & Disney lobby for subverting root control in all
| devices, or that so many people mindlessly agree its the
| right direction to go and their world will be a better place
| for it.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I'm absolutely not a fan of giving a game the level of kernel
| access these games take without my permission. That said,
| cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience
| online, and I really don't know of any other solution. What's
| been frustrating over the years is when kernel anti-cheats,
| unbeknownst to you, are causing issues with other games entirely
| unrelated to what you are playing - because some game developers
| had a bad habit of leaving them running/idle even if you were not
| playing.
|
| I have a dedicated laptop for gaming that I do absolutely nothing
| else on, not even logging into email accounts. Just steam + games
| + whatever video software I might need. This is my sane
| compromise as someone who participates in a lot of competitive
| games. it sucks, but I see no better solution than to disclose it
| (insane this wasn't the standard already). Even that is hard,
| because if you disclose too much, cheaters can take advantage.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| > That said, cheating is an existential threat to a good game
| experience online
|
| I never understood this.
|
| As I mentioned in another thread, maybe I'm just old or
| something now, but I've never given a fuck if another player
| was cheating.
|
| Back in the day it was pretty normal to run into someone using
| aimbot or wall hack or whatever shit.
|
| You would just change server or join a different lobby or
| whatever if it was really bothering your enjoyment.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Games with ranked systems will always be cheated. If you play
| competitively and attain a sufficiently high rank, you will
| encounter cheaters inevitably. If cheating hits a certain
| threshold (or even the perception of cheating), the system
| collapses because people won't compete in a system they
| perceive as unfair. It isn't a matter of just changing
| servers when there are consequences for winning/losing. Even
| worse, many competitive games offer specific, tangible
| rewards such as items/skins/etc. for winning, which heavily
| incentivizes cheaters even further. I have definitely stopped
| playing games completely because of cheating issues - one
| dumb one particularly for me are m/kb players on playstation
| FPS games, which is trivial to stop and detect, but they
| won't do it. I'd vastly prefer something invasive on my
| playstation to prevent that experience than the alternative,
| which is to just not play.
| thanzex wrote:
| That's not a thing you can do on many games nowadays. I
| assume this comment is also related to this thread
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/31/24284644/apex-legends-
| lo...
|
| There's no concept of "server" or "Change lobby" on Apex or
| other Battle royales.
|
| You just queue up for a game, which lasts ~20 minutes. As you
| are in a 3 player team if you disconnect from the game you
| get a temp ban penalty, since that also degrades other
| players experience. So there's no disconnecting freely once a
| game has started. Now imagine you're playing for 10-15
| minutes just to die without really having any chance. That
| gets frustrating, really quickly, since winning is close to
| the only "reward" you get from playing the game.
|
| It's not like a classic COD or Battlefield game, where you
| can feely leave or join any game/server. Once you're in
| you're somewhat committed, and you have no control over where
| or with whom you're playing against.
| alexandre_m wrote:
| > and I really don't know of any other solution
|
| Behavior AI-driven anti-cheat system running on the server
| side.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| This sounds nice, but it isn't a thing that would really
| work. This excellent post in this same thread explains why:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42004965
| pphysch wrote:
| > cheating is an existential threat to a good game experience
| online, and I really don't know of any other solution.
|
| Cheating is downstream of the trust problem with an anonymous
| global "community". Anti-cheat is just an arms race, but there
| are other avenues to addressing it (weak "KYC", like requiring
| a phone number to play ranked modes).
|
| Deadlock is _potentially_ doing something interesting with its
| invite-only EA system. They 're essentially building a social
| graph of players, which could be leveraged to identify
| "cheating rings"/compromised accounts and seed some kind of
| social reputation system within the community.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| This is a really interesting and potentially great idea, but
| I am fundamentally against the KYC thing because it puts me
| in a position where I'm at the whims of whatever BS automated
| moderation systems they put in place these days, which is
| usually quite terrible.
| pphysch wrote:
| With effective KYC, each moderation action has more weight
| (because user accounts have more weight), so in theory the
| moderators can focus more on quality than raw throughput.
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