[HN Gopher] How Riot Games is fighting the war against video gam...
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How Riot Games is fighting the war against video game hackers
Author : badmonster
Score : 34 points
Date : 2025-05-04 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| josephcsible wrote:
| This article seems to be making all of the worst things about
| anti-cheat (kernel modules, mandatory Secure Boot/TPM, etc.) seem
| like good things. Why?
| nekitamo wrote:
| The alternative is that the online games they're protecting
| become infested with cheaters, players depart, and the game
| closes down because it's no longer a viable business.
|
| It's not nice, I don't like running a kernel mode anti-cheat
| any more than you do, but I can see why it's necessary for
| preserving the competitive integrity of free-to-play shooter
| games like Valorant.
| imchillyb wrote:
| If one must give up kernel level security of their system to
| an untrusted 3rd party, was it really free?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Stuff you run as your user can already read all your files
| and memory of processes of that user so you're already very
| exposed.
| __alexs wrote:
| They are already full of cheaters. DMA cards are undetectable
| even from kernel anti cheat.
| doikor wrote:
| The DMA card still needs to be installed, have drivers
| installed, firmware, etc. The anti cheat tests for that
| (the cheaters do mask the device spoofing the
| name/vendor/etc). Having to make new driver/firmware every
| time the anti cheat starts to detect it is way slower then
| just new software. Though at some point they will probably
| just automate it so that every customer gets their own
| driver and firmware matched with only their cheat software
| making this way harder but we are not there yet (and you
| would have to get all of these signed so following the cert
| chain should make it easier to find at least whos stolen
| cert they are using)
|
| Also the amount of people willing to buy another pc and DMA
| cards is way smaller making the chance of running into
| cheater in your match smaller.
| az09mugen wrote:
| That's a good idea indeed.
| __alexs wrote:
| Giving every customer their own firmware is already
| automated.
|
| Computer vision based cheats are also rapidly on the
| rise. You don't get wall hacks but you do top 1% reaction
| times and perfect tracking.
| abigail95 wrote:
| are you writing your own firmware or hotwiring the bus?
| there are many methods to detect this.
| doikor wrote:
| Realistically what is the alternative? That is pretty much the
| only way to ensure the cheats don't run at kernel level. If the
| cheat runs at kernel level it is very hard (or impossible) to
| detect it from user land outside of behavior (which mostly
| happens on the server side).
|
| Only thing I can think of is Microsoft locking down Windows so
| hard that nothing outside of code written (well signed) by
| Microsoft can run with kernel level privileges but I think that
| is an even worse option.
|
| If you don't like it you can always just go and play any of the
| titles without kernel level anti-cheat and get a cheater in
| ~1/5th of your games (my experience in counter strike).
| jjmarr wrote:
| Chess essentially has ID verification at a high level because
| the best players can go to real-life tournaments and get
| titles for the prestige, which grants them free premium
| accounts on major platforms. It's easier to analyze the
| subset of top-tier players that aren't verified.
|
| I'd rather just give Riot Games my driver's licence than full
| access to my computer. They already know my name and where I
| live from metadata.
|
| There should be a KYC solution for gaming where a company
| like Epic, Riot, or Valve verifies your identity and
| developers can gate competitive video games behind that. If
| you cheat, you're out for 5-10 years (so dumb teenagers
| aren't locked out forever). The big issue imo isn't banning
| cheaters, it's preventing them from creating a new account
| and cheating again.
|
| Such a system would be free money & low maintenance for
| whatever company develops it first.
| doikor wrote:
| This is actually how cheating is "solved" to some degree in
| South Korea. Basically you can't play without logging in
| with your government provided id.
|
| Though they do also use it for stuff like under 16 year
| olds not being able to play online games between midnight
| and 6am.
|
| edit: Some extra details about this from a few months ago
| https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617
|
| > KR (Korea) requires national identity numbers for gaming,
| which opens up a convenient opportunity to ban cheaters at
| the "soul" level. It is remarkably effective at keeping
| them out of game for longer periods of time--cheaters have
| to buy whole new identities to keep playing, so the bans
| really stick.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| This makes the stakes for getting caught cheating, much
| higher. It does nothing to "solve" cheating. If someone
| is using additional code to gain an un-fair advantage,
| knowing who they are does nothing to detect this.
| doikor wrote:
| But it does lower the amount of cheaters as the
| consequences are bigger. Also makes manual
| banning/moderation much more cost effective as the bans
| actually stick.
|
| At the end of the day the goal isn't 0 cheaters but
| having few enough that the chance of your match being
| ruined by one is 1 or 2% instead of 10 or 20%
| bob1029 wrote:
| I don't see why something like ChexSystems IDV wouldn't be
| viable here.
|
| Acquire my identity in the same way you would if I was
| seeking approval for a new checking account or loan. I'd be
| perfectly happy to see the bar raised a few inches off the
| ground. The current state of competitive video games is
| really bad.
| razemio wrote:
| It seriously isn't. Effectively you can not ban cheating. A
| cheater can just use virtual or modified hardware keyboards,
| displays and mice to cheat. How is a kernel extension going
| to prevent that? That is the logical next step, which is
| already being done by some (currently less than alpha). Once
| we reach this state as a default, nothing can prevent
| cheating, besides a real tournament with checked hardware.
| All the effort riot is currently putting into this will be
| for nothing. I do not understand, how they are missing that.
| doikor wrote:
| That is what you use behavior detection for. If you don't
| give human like inputs from the cheat it is detectable and
| if you limit yourself to what a human can do then the cheat
| is not very desirable.
|
| > "You have to humanize [the cheat] to a degree where the
| advantage is imperceptible from what a human can do," said
| Koskinas. "And once you're there, you're not really
| cheating enough to make it worth it for most users."
|
| But if you read the article they do have some way to detect
| (some) DMA based hacks too where the actual cheat runs on a
| different computer and use DMA through a pci-express card
| to read/write directly into memory.
|
| > "I think we detect the majority of it today, but it's
| kind of iterative," said Koskinas.
|
| Though most cheaters "rage cheating" after losing really
| badly and using cheats to "get back" and those are much
| easier to detects. This kind of "download random cheat from
| the internet" at the best only get you banned and at worst
| your computer is super duper hacked (you are effectively
| manually downloading a virus and manually giving it
| admin/kernel level access)
|
| > Thanks to all these techniques and strategies, most
| cheaters can now be roughly divided into two categories.
| The first, representing the majority of cheaters, is made
| up by those who are "rage cheating" by using cheap tools
| that are easy to detect. Riot employees sarcastically call
| these cheats "download-a-ban," according to Koskinas.
|
| At the end of the day all I know from my own experience is
| that the difference in the amount of cheaters I run into
| between Counter Strike and Valorant is massive and the main
| claimed difference being kernel level stuff in Valorants
| anti cheat (or Valve is just really really bad at making
| anti cheats)
| jimbob45 wrote:
| This
|
| CS2 is entirely unplayable now due to hackers. I'm told
| Valorant isn't much better. There's probably just no
| solution unless you design your game to not benefit from
| hacking (e.g. Hearthstone, MTG)
| doikor wrote:
| I play both and in my experience Valorant is way better.
| Better as in "less cheaters" not "better game".
|
| Though as I understand the amount of cheaters in both
| games varies based on how high/low in the ranked rating
| you are.
| pcwalton wrote:
| You can raise the cost of cheating so that cheating kids
| will get annoyed and go cheat in some other game or scroll
| TikTok or whatever. We're not exactly dealing with nation-
| states here.
| jokoon wrote:
| Most cheating software come from china and russia, I
| still bet those government actively encourage cheating in
| games just to annoy western countries.
| smallstepforman wrote:
| Grow up, you cannot honestly think that government
| employees in Russian and China dont have more important
| things to deal with than ruining western teenage gamers
| experience with state funded cheat codes and hacks.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| That's the thing with psyops and "plausible deniability"
| stuff. Do too much of it and eventually you'll be blamed
| for everything that's gone bad no matter if you actually
| did it or not. China and Russia are in the "FO" phase of
| "FAFO".
|
| Besides, sowing discontent is a tried and true propaganda
| strategy.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| "Bored kids" is a pretty naive idea of cheating in PvP
| games. There's custom hardware for it, and a surprisingly
| large amount of people spend more than $1k/mo just to
| cheat in video games.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| In all fairness, anti-cheat is like a lock. No lock will
| prevent a determined thief from just breaking your window,
| but the point is to keep out the majority of "easy
| thieves". For them the goal isn't the be perfect but to not
| be the easy target.
|
| Now is a kerbal level anti-cheat overkill? Hard to say from
| the outside but it does seem like installing a steel vault
| for your door. While the window is still right there as
| normal.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| _> Realistically what is the alternative?_
|
| What even makes you think it's a solvable problem? Even with
| a totally cryptographically controlled end-to-end hardware
| chain that treats the player like an adversary/inmate (like
| in the consoles, maybe even more strict) there's always a
| possibility of ML-based cheats with a low-latency camera.
| Barely anyone does that now because there are easier methods,
| but trust me, it will get used if required, just like DMA is
| used now. People already throw crazy money into cheating.
|
| It's a race to the bottom where everybody eventually loses
| except the corporations. Players never get rid of the
| cheaters completely, unrelated people who don't play games
| get their hardware+software locked down because of a bunch of
| whiny gamers, and corpos obtain the ultimate vendor lock.
|
| The optimal amount of bad behavior is not zero.
| doikor wrote:
| So just because lock picking lawyer can pick the locks at
| your home you should just get rid of the locks? (and maybe
| even the doors too)
|
| Making it hard enough is good enough. The difference in 1%
| of games having a cheater and 5 or 10% is massive in the
| player experience.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > So just because lock picking lawyer can pick the locks
| at your home you should just get rid of the locks? (and
| maybe even the doors too)
|
| If the locks treated me, the legitimate owner, as a
| criminal and required the kind of low-level access that
| software that runs at the kernel level gets, _and_ still
| didn 't work, then maybe.
| dingnuts wrote:
| it's more like, I'm not going to spend money on a smart
| lock that reports my movements to a third party just so a
| burglar can chuck a landscaping stone through my window
| and unlock the door
| wiseowise wrote:
| > So just because lock picking lawyer can pick the locks
| at your home you should just get rid of the locks? (and
| maybe even the doors too)
|
| The solution is not to make the lock so hard that it
| inconveniences you, the user, it is to shoot intruder on
| sight (aka better moderation).
| doikor wrote:
| > Players never get rid of the cheaters completely
|
| > The optimal amount of bad behavior is not zero.
|
| Obviously the goal never has been to have 0 cheaters. Just
| from the detection side you need to delay the bans, let in
| some of the previously detected cheats again, etc to keep
| the cat and mouse game going on (make it harder to A/B test
| your cheats)
|
| https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617
|
| > Worse still, is that we actually have to let them back
| in. When we outright "block" a cheating method, we are
| technically providing the cheater an instantaneous surface
| to iterate against, allowing them to A/B test their cheats
| until they find something that is actually undetected at
| that layer.
|
| > unrelated people who don't play games get their
| hardware+software locked down because of a bunch of whiny
| gamers
|
| If you think it is an issue then don't play their game.
| Very few companies are willing to go through the effort as
| it is actually quite a lot of work just from the security
| vulnerability aspects alone (and you also have to
| effectively detect the cheats too)
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Ban delay is a standard practice, as is raising the entry
| barrier, but everything both did was creating a culture
| that made cheaters adapt and get more and more involved,
| to the point where the cheating itself is the game. What
| anticheat companies brag about in your link and in the PR
| piece in OP is entirely irrelevant, the reality is pretty
| different. I know because I'm pretty familiar with it,
| having studied it for years in a low-energy mode.
|
| _> If you think it is an issue then don't play their
| game._
|
| This is a hypothetical example which would affect
| everyone regardless of playing any games. Not an existing
| thing, thankfully.
|
| (although I wouldn't be surprised if the pressure will
| eventually be enough to make this happen. The fact that
| you can't fix a rotten culture with authoritarian
| measures without affecting everyone else never stopped
| anyone)
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Community servers that people can host and create hacker-free
| spaces.
| squigz wrote:
| Is there any actual data on how prevalent cheating really is?
| In my experience, it's not remotely as big of an issue as
| some people make it out to be...
| dfxm12 wrote:
| We can play online games on purpose made hardware, leaving
| more freedom over our PC's
| mvdtnz wrote:
| They're neither inherently good nor bad but unfortunately
| necessary.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Insert the quote about freedom vs securities. This author (or
| his sponsors) clearly made their choice.
|
| Makes me glad I prefer mostly single player content and never
| tolerate this stuff on my PC. If I gotta be locked down I'll
| just pick up a console.
| jokoon wrote:
| It can be seen as a Chinese backdoor on western computers.
|
| I am not expert, but I think it's not necessarily the case?
|
| Cheating is really a plague right now, and the only way to
| mitigate it is using kernel anti cheat.
| ronsor wrote:
| And now AI can pretend to be input devices and need only
| video output. Kernel anti-cheat will be useless, and we'll be
| better off for it.
|
| If your solution is bad, it doesn't deserve to work. Find
| something else.
| doikor wrote:
| Though if the AI is only as good as a human can be it is
| not that desirable. If the cheat does "super human" stuff
| it can be detected from behavior on the server side though
| this is after the fact from processing some replay files
| and thus not that "great" for players as the cheater gets
| to ruin at least one game.
|
| > "You have to humanize [the cheat] to a degree where the
| advantage is imperceptible from what a human can do," said
| Koskinas. "And once you're there, you're not really
| cheating enough to make it worth it for most users."
|
| But it is something they acknowledge will be an issue at
| some point in the future. Personally I think for now AI is
| way too slow as all the computation needs to happen in a
| few milliseconds to really be effective.
|
| > Koskinas says he often worries about the use of AI for
| screen classification, to learn what human inputs look
| like, and how to reproduce them.
| az09mugen wrote:
| Since AI is everywhere you think it can be used to spot
| cheaters behaviours ?
| ronsor wrote:
| Yes, that's the real solution, not rootkits.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| AI certainly is _not_ the solution. It has its issues,
| false positives, and there 's barely any way to get
| support for that case as support agents are instructed
| with the AI being infallible.
| doikor wrote:
| Has been used for some time now.
|
| https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617
|
| > "Behavior" refers to an ML suspension (also called
| "server-sided" anti-cheat), often given to ragehackers.
|
| But then you can just teach an AI to act like a human.
| Anti cheats in computer games is and always will be a cat
| and mouse game and AI/ML is just another tool in the bag
| of many tools (most bans seem to be fingerprinting based
| basically rebanning previous offenders who failed to get
| around the fingerprinting system)
| int_19h wrote:
| The fundamental problem is that a subtle enough cheater
| is indistinguishable from a good enough human player.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is really ridiculous that we've allowed all this kernel level
| spyware bullshit in the interest of something so frivolous as
| video game fairness.
|
| Matchmaking seemed like a neat idea in, like, 2007. In
| retrospect, it has damaged the industry substantially. All the
| oxygen has been sucked out of the community server space,
| etiquette is non-existent, and the aforementioned spyware.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I refuse to buy a ton of games because they are hot garbage
| these days. Its pretty obvious what gamers want and they will
| shower their money at it. Look at Oblivion remastered. It had
| bare minimum marketing if you can even claim it had any
| marketing.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Tbf, a part of the issues causing since rampant cheating
| comes from the fact that those Riot games are indeed "what
| gamers want". There's definitely a divide in community
| between single player darlings like BGS's output and these
| "free" competitive service games like League or Apex or
| whatnot.
| unclad5968 wrote:
| Then don't play those video games. Seems simple to me.
| Community servers are doing fine in games where that makes
| sense, Minecraft for example. Counter strike has community
| servers too and people cheat there all the time.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't and won't. But it seems fair to miss the old days of
| your mall and board game shop in response to the torn down
| remains you abandoned.
| squigz wrote:
| Except it's not a matter of community servers not being
| supported in games "because it doesn't make sense" - there
| are plenty of games where private community servers would be
| beneficial, but all we get is online matchmaking that gets
| shut down when the company decides it's done.
|
| Pretty unfair to paint this as the users choice when the
| companies are taking our choices away.
| snkzxbs wrote:
| If you think fairness in videogame competitions is frivolous
| then do not participate in them. Is it frivolous to not want
| dopers in cycling competitions?
| ndriscoll wrote:
| As someone who doesn't participate in those, your comparison
| seems poor to me. Like my mom asked a while back if I'd get
| into valorant with her and my sister on weekends sometime,
| but I'm not going to dual boot or buy another computer just
| for this game. Why do they require rootkits for casual play?
| It'd be like bicycle manufacturers subjecting you to drug
| tests and access to random home inspections to ride around
| your neighborhood.
|
| If you need to protect competitive play, keep it to actual
| competitions/make it optional for free play. I'm not giving
| you unrestricted access to my brokerage account, all of my
| files, all of my emails/text messages, etc. (which root
| access on my computer has) so you can prevent cheating in a
| Sunday night video game.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I just uninstalled ALL Riot Games from my Gaming Computer.
|
| Reason: Vanguard was crashing another Unity based game I play
| nonstop. It also seemed to decrease system stability in general.
|
| I will never play another Riot Game so long as this software is a
| part of it.
| jokoon wrote:
| I wonder who makes that anticheat, I mean in what country.
|
| Obviously they have so many users, they might need to fix it.
|
| I can imagine that Microsoft might try to help them doing
| things right.
| jokoon wrote:
| I stopped playing counter strike like 2 months ago after playing
| for 6 months, because I was getting paranoid about closet
| cheaters. My trust in the game eroded, even though cheaters are
| not there all the time.
|
| Closet cheaters are cheating in subtle ways, which make it
| impossible to know if they're really cheating.
|
| It's a constant analysis of "is he cheating or am I bad?", and
| most of the time, I could not really know. It's a psychologically
| toxic experience as I cannot focus on the game itself. I was
| enjoying the game, but that paranoia made things just unbearable.
|
| I suspect china/russia are actively paying people to make
| effective cheating software, as it's also a lucrative business.
|
| Even a few pro players are cheating. Those online FPS are rotten
| to the core.
|
| Apparently valve doesn't seem to care that much, because they
| probably know that there is a big overlap between cheaters and
| people who trade skins, who are a big source of income.
|
| Too bad!
| vips7L wrote:
| Honestly this sounds like you've just over thought it. You've
| played CS for 6 months, you are bad!
| skupig wrote:
| CS has a concept of "trust factor" which groups people more
| likely to be cheating in the same game. If you ever queue
| with a friend with a low trust factor (which happens a lot if
| they're on a smurf account), there are cheaters in pretty
| much every game... seeing that many blatant cheaters has
| really made me think there must be a lot of smarter cheaters
| flying under the radar in regular games. It's basically
| impossible to tell whether someone is wallhacking or if they
| have really good game sense.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| I've played for many years including CS1.6, CS:S, GO, and 2.
| I regularly snoop profiles and overwhelmingly there are
| accounts with 1 game, all F2P games, short account lives, low
| hours (CS2, GO + account), low or no commendations, low match
| count, blocked stat tracking... Slews of markers that these
| are less-than-legit, either smurfing (IMO a form of cheating)
| or outright hacking. Then they coincidentally overperform for
| their respective rank. That's without mentioning coming
| across numerous individuals with [sometimes multiple] bans
| recorded on their accounts.
|
| My account is 20 years old. And has several games with
| hundreds of hours including a couple of perfect games, not to
| mention a hundred or more games. Also phone verified. I don't
| expect _everyone_ to have similar accounts, but it 's seldom
| I'm matched against anything even remotely similar, say 5
| year old accounts with similar playtimes in non-F2P games,
| though many profiles are private, which itself is - I think -
| also suspicious since virtually everyone leverages aliases on
| Steam so I can't really imagine a case for this other than
| obscuration, though I'm certain some people do it for privacy
| reasons I expect that rationale is rare.
|
| Beyond that I would say there are a lot of suspicious
| individuals I've been matched against in both premier and
| comp . Regardless of whether or not they're smurfs it makes
| MM obnoxious if only because you end up matched against
| people who rage and ruin 45m-1h of your time by competing
| illicitly.
|
| The MM algo is also just shit without these considerations
| lumped on top of it. I regularly play with my friends who
| rank lower and that draws my rank down so we get matched in
| low ranks, resulting in violent pubstomping. Of course I play
| on my _only_ account, so I 'm sure I get hackusated a lot,
| which would ostensibly get my trust factor drug through the
| mud. I suppose that's a solid incentive for smurfing on its
| own, especially since the system is opaque.
|
| It's all pretty bad, frankly. Faceit is hardly better, a lot
| of the community is pretty toxic and obnoxious salty tryhard
| metabangers that aren't fun to play with.
| rcxdude wrote:
| This attitude is a bit alien to me. At the level I play games
| (which is in the range of like 90% of gamers), my opponents are
| basically anonymous, and someone obviously cheating and someone
| smurfing has about the same effect of ruining the fun. The
| points mean nothing except maybe to measure my own improvement
| at the game. If someone's cheating and I can't tell them from
| the other players, I don't care.
| hoten wrote:
| If you can't fully connect your results in the game to your
| skill (because you can't trust if the others cheated), then
| you can't trust you are improving (or how to adapt to maybe
| improve).
|
| On an evolutionary level, the purpose of play is to improve
| your skill in something in a tight, enjoyable feedback loop.
| Cheating messes with that.
|
| Though your approach is preferable, I do think cheating (or
| more broadly, not trusting that you can learn how to improve
| with further play) kneecaps the whole point of playing.
|
| (I'm badly presenting an idea I learned from Jonathan Blow
| re: how some game design ideas, such as opaque adaptive
| difficulty like rubberbanding found in racing games, destroys
| the purpose of playing)
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't think these subtle cheats make a big difference in
| matchmaking type games anyway. It could be finding cheat-
| enhanced bad players, or non-cheat-enhanced good players.
| If the cheats are subtle, who can tell the difference?
| shrell wrote:
| I sincerely doubt a single person you thought had subtle hacks
| was hacking.
|
| People constantly cry that the other team is hacking and
| reviewing the demo shows that they almost never are. The
| reality is they were just better. That seems to be hard for a
| large portion of the player base to handle. Low ranks and low
| trust factor are full of obvious hacks because they make an
| account, get banned and repeat. You don't see the decent hacks
| until the upper ranks because you need to be good enough at the
| game to hide it and would just rank up fast through the middle
| rankd
| anon22981 wrote:
| I can't speak for the lower ranks, but I was mid-ish on
| premium this season (played from 17k to 23k then stopped
| iirc) but a lot of the cheaters were subtle enough that not
| everyone realized that they were cheating, even though they
| pretty blatant from my perspective. (For reference, I play
| lvl 10 faceit and have a decent understanding of the game.)
|
| Point being that a "subtle hacker" might be subtle to some
| and obvious to others. So OP, being a newbie with only 6 mo
| of experience, might suspect someone being subtle about their
| hacking but they might be very blatant to a more experienced
| player.
| ziggure wrote:
| Are these rootkits?
| ronsor wrote:
| Yes. That's the point.
| to-too-two wrote:
| This might be a terrible idea, and likely would never work for a
| multitude of reasons, but I was wondering if everyone in the
| future were gaming via streaming services that way players
| wouldn't be running the game on their own hardware or software.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Part of what scares me about React Server Components is that it
| very directly matches the web down this path. Instead of APIs
| and data and a front end app, the web becomes a view screen for
| computetion running far far away.
|
| The Flutter vision feels very similar, treating the web as a
| big canvas to draw pixels on.
| doikor wrote:
| Very unlikely to happen anytime soon in competitive shooters
| like Valorant where gamers spend thousands of dollars just to
| get a few millisecond advantage from faster monitor, mouse,
| etc.
|
| Adding an extra 5 or 10ms of delay would be a massive issue
| (especially bad if it is an inconsistent delay)
| doikor wrote:
| One thing to note is that Microsoft is planning some kind of
| kernel anti tampering system in future that hopefully will give
| us user level anti cheats that actually work. Though some will
| very likely see this as some kind of "we don't control our
| computers anymore" move.
|
| https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-...
|
| > "On Demand" Vanguard
|
| > "As was foretold, a future will eventually arrive where we can
| rely on the security features of Windows to protect its own
| kernel, instead of protecting it from boot with a driver. This
| will allow us the opportunity to start our anti-cheat services
| when the game client runs, provided the end-user has opted into
| all of these features. We'll have more communication on this
| topic early next year, but if you're on Windows 11 and on
| relatively recent hardware, we wanted to let you know that you
| won't have to tolerate the taskbar icon forever (even though we
| worked very hard on Vanguard's logo)."
|
| https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/11/19/windo...
|
| > "To help our customers and partners increase resilience, we are
| developing new Windows capabilities that will allow security
| product developers to build their products outside of kernel
| mode. This means security products, like anti-virus solutions,
| can run in user mode just as apps do. This change will help
| security developers provide a high level of security, easier
| recovery, and there will be less impact to Windows in the event
| of a crash or mistake. A private preview will be made available
| for our security product ecosystem in July 2025."
| smallstepforman wrote:
| Secure boot is a problem for users with secondary alternative
| OS's (eg Haiku). I even have a DOS tool which needs high
| precision timing which no general purpose multitasking OS can
| provide. These alternative systems are hampered by secure boot.
|
| And speaking of up to date video drivers, these checks are a
| plague of usability. If I have stable driver rev 235, why would I
| install latest buggy version 246? Eg. AMD has 2 flavours of
| drivers, Adrenalin which has "optimisations", but crashes, and
| the Pro drivers which are older but more stable, and have 10 bit
| support, more colour spaces etc. I'm done dealing with
| experimental drivers, give me stability 100% time. Games which
| insist that I run experimental drivers and secure boot can get
| stuffed.
| prkl wrote:
| This reads like privacy-invasion propaganda directly from the
| Chinese state. "Look how great we are at having full control over
| your PC. You know, to battle cheaters!".
|
| Kernel-level anticheat is ridiculous. Especially when your data
| becomes a gaping would ready for the chinese state to stick their
| fingers into and twist around. It's like the police installing
| mandatory cameras in everyones house to catch thieves (if society
| here is games with kernel-level cheats).
|
| I want to go back to the days of Windows 7. When there was
| minimal corporate bloat in the ecosystem, no ads in the
| startmenu, and when game studios actually knew what they were
| talking about and had some balls to stand up for their values.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Riot doesn't use a kernel anticheat on mac os because Apple
| provides sufficient security from their OS. Once Microsoft
| eventually catches up Riot will not need a kernel level
| anticheat for Windows. The ridiculous thing is how Microsoft
| has failed to secure Windows from cheaters despite it being a
| problem for such a long time.
| 7qW24A wrote:
| Yeah but that's an interesting technical point, more suited
| to 2015 HN - in 2025 we can't let technical matters get in
| the way of our Sinophobia...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The ridiculous thing is how Microsoft has failed to secure
| Windows from cheaters despite it being a problem for such a
| long time.
|
| The problem is, it's gotten hard to do drivers for custom
| hardware on macOS as a result for everything that can't be
| done with libusb as a result - and it's also gotten harder to
| patch over deficiencies of macOS.
|
| You can't have an OS that you can tinker around with and an
| OS that is secure from cheaters, software pirates and malware
| at the same time. Android is the best example - either you
| run an OS that passes Play Integrity/SafetyNet and is blessed
| by Google and thus can use games, Netflix, banking or a whole
| lot of other apps that require non-rooted phones these days,
| but you lose e.g. the ability to do an actual full-device
| backup, or you run a phone that's rooted or runs a custom OS
| (say, aftermarket once the manufacturer ceases providing even
| security updates) but you lose out on about 2/3rds of apps
| because they just refuse to run.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >You can't have an OS that you can tinker around with and
| an OS that is secure from cheaters
|
| But do these need to be the same OS? Or is it possible to
| have them be partitioned off from each other that way you
| can have a game run with full integrity and then also be
| able to have a customized experience for things which don't
| care about integrity.
| Neikius wrote:
| The consequence game does not work on Linux as far as I am
| aware. Interesting in the time when most of the other games
| do.
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