This is great and all, but I feel like all of these client side cheat detection tools are basically a waste of time. Trying to enforce the trustworthiness of the client is basically an unwinnable arms race between anti-cheat and the cheat makers. A better approach is for the server to treat all clients as hostile and untrustworthy and use a combination of heuristics and statistics to ferret out malicious client behavior. Valve has been doing some very interesting stuff with VACnet where they employ deep learning to flag potential cheater accounts in CS:GO and then have humans review and rule on the output. From what I have read and watched, it has been very successful.
Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck
61–70 of 327 posts
Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck
#62What permissions does this require? A kernel module? Something that watches all processes all the time? Messes with input settings or breaks assistive devices? On windows, a lot of the actions that "anti-cheat" software takes is indistinguishable from a rootkit.
The dev page still says "The Anti-Cheat Client interface currently only supports the Windows platform and requires a 64-bit operating system installation. Mac and Linux client support are coming soon." so there's not much info yet. I'm guessing it'll require a specific kernel version and an obfuscated kernel patch that probes everything and calls a web service constantly.
Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure except EAC doesn't work, even on windows with the full kernel rootkit installed. Money back guarantee SaaS cheats are like $10/month that are undetected by EAC.
You know this? You've personally tried them? Or is this secondhand, thirdhand, hypothetical knowledge? It seems to me that anti-cheat works the same way DRM works: It poses a barrier to entry that keeps NN% of people who would hack from hacking, which is sufficient to keep the game from becoming a hacker cesspool.
As someone who runs an online Counterstrike platform, I can attest to this firsthand. There are literally dozens of open source cheats on Github that bypass the major anticheat services. And when one gets detected, they're usually updated in just a few days. For private paid cheats, they're very rarely detected. I've heard of people paying thousands of dollars for custom-built cheats that have gone years and years without being detected.
The cheating in the game is out of control and has been for half a decade. People still play and can find little pockets to play in to avoid cheaters (namely playing with friends or on paid services, that cut down on cheating due to the barrier to entry of cost), but it's inevitably unavoidable to consistently run into cheaters
My approach has been to run no client anti cheat outside of that built into the game (VAC), as I don't believe invading people's privacy (e.g. always-on kernel level detection) for the illusion of reducing cheating is worth it. There are better ways of hindering cheating than on-client detection, in my humble opinion.
Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure except EAC doesn't work, even on windows with the full kernel rootkit installed. Money back guarantee SaaS cheats are like $10/month that are undetected by EAC.
And those aren't even cheaters using a full DMA module and separate PC which is nearly impossible to detect if done properly.
Or worse machine-learning-to-bounding-box that takes the video stream through HDMI, identifies character heads, intercepts the USB HID mouse, and injects movement commands to move the center of the screen towards the nearest "head". Literally (not nearly) impossible to detect, there is no difference between this and just aiming by hand. The video is already out of the box, and the USB HID packets look the same as the real mouse's commands.
I spent about two months creating training data for this and it now runs smoothly on a sister PC with a capture card. I gave up because I got bored (and perhaps felt guilty about cheating) but I wholeheartedly believe I could have played top 500 region online matches and gotten away with it, as investigations usually trigger manual DMA checks by ESEA/Faceit mods, and a manual ("automated") ban in that case. But there is no DMA in my setup. The only way to get banned would be to play stupidly and obviously cheat, and to be honest that's a plus of my setup: the neural network is not perfect, so the aimbot can't be perfect. Like a built-in humanizer.
Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck
#65Does PUBG not use this, or does it just not work that well?
It appears to use BattlEye which is another anti-cheat solution
https://www.protondb.com/app/578080
The thing is, part of the challenge is that we don't really know if the game itself will work because people can't get past the anti-cheat to see if the game itself works.
Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh great, so you've solved the problem then. The entire industry just hasn't discovered your one simple trick. You should let them know.
Yeah except he's right, the vast majority of cheaters can be detected server side. Literally no game does this, because ?????
They do. And after a few weeks/months there will be a ban wave. But there really isnt incentive to fix these problems because if you ban cheaters they have to buy new copies of games.
Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh great, so you've solved the problem then. The entire industry just hasn't discovered your one simple trick. You should let them know.
Valve does this though. I'm pretty sure their VACnet is more effective than their classical anticheat. It's just a lot more effort.
VACnet IS more effective than their previous system, but that's a LOW bar. CS:GO is still full of obvious spinbotters and wallhackers that get to ruin a hundred competitive games before eventually getting banned, and just grabbing a new account. VACnet for some reason can't even get the obvious stuff; Spinbotting looks nothing like a normal person playing, to the point that you could probably write "if average rotation rate > some high bar then ban" and do better
Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck
#68I could totally see Linux hitting 5+ percent market share for desktops on the next couple years
I think at this point I just need a Google Drive client. 1Password is already there, Obsidian is there, I'm ready to go
Ubuntu supports Google Drive out of the box, it appears in the file manager. Probably it's Gnome doing the actual work, I haven't really bothered to learn it well.
Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck
#69For context, ProtonDB is a database of Steam games and how well they work on Linux through Wine/Proton. A huge number of the "borked" games are using some kind of anti-cheat and that's the main reason the game doesn't work. EAC is one of the most-used anti-cheat systems in gaming. Between EAC and BattleEye, you're hitting the Pareto Principle for anti-cheat support. Four of the top 10 Steam games use anti-cheat and t…
Worth noting that the VAC games on that list, CS:GO, TF2, and Dota 2, have effectively given up on actually detecting and preventing cheaters and now rely on server-based or community-consensus methods of finding and punishing cheaters (with TF2 being the exception with how little maintenance Valve performs on it). Both CS:GO and Dota 2 have a report+overwatch system where users watch a replay to determine if someone…
I can’t quite tell if you think this system is reasonably effective or not. It certainly seems less invasive, so it would be good if it were. Are you able to comment on that?
> You can readily download the biggest script client for Dota 2, and VAC ban waves for using it have been unheard of for years now (you only get an in-game ban when enough other players verify the cheating via Overwatch).
Does this mean you think the ban process is too slow and involved?
Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck
#70This is great and all, but I feel like all of these client side cheat detection tools are basically a waste of time. Trying to enforce the trustworthiness of the client is basically an unwinnable arms race between anti-cheat and the cheat makers. A better approach is for the server to treat all clients as hostile and untrustworthy and use a combination of heuristics and statistics to ferret out malicious client behav…
All Valve has done is made it so people cheat and pretend to be legitimate, you can't beat cheaters outside of making it a non-cheatable game, you can just reduce it. Then again, if nobody notices that you're a cheater, are you a cheater?