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Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

dev.epicgames.com

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Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#111

Post by vkou »

jtms wrote: post #61

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 behav…

It's an unwinnable arms race if your goal is zero cheating.

It can work well enough if your goal is 'ban/hellban cheaters relatively quickly'. If the time/money cost of creating a new account is non-trivial, this can very well get cheating down to some acceptable level.

Server-side statistics can be used in addition to this kind of client-side monitoring, but there's only so much that can be inferred from statistics. It may not be too difficult to determine if someone is using, say, an aimbot from statistics, but it's very difficult to determine if they are using a radar - because the cheater still has to make fuzzy, human decisions, based on the information that radar gives them - and because its difficult to tell radar apart from good gamesense.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#112

Post by franknine »

Thaxll wrote: post #80
jtms wrote: post #61

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 behav…

Because it's not as trivial as you think it is to get good results if you rely only on the server side, if it was the case everyone would do that. Server side cheat detection actually don't detect that much, like how do you known someone is wallhacking? As for manual review it just does no scale, when you see that CoD banned 100k cheaters, imagine if one person from activision would have to review every cases. Cloud…

https://twitter.com/anticheatpd/status/1412024189561851904?s...

There are cheats doing CV on video stream and they work on consoles. I guess they would also work on cloud gaming services.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#113

Post by SXX »

Thaxll wrote: post #80
jtms wrote: post #61

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 behav…

Because it's not as trivial as you think it is to get good results if you rely only on the server side, if it was the case everyone would do that. Server side cheat detection actually don't detect that much, like how do you known someone is wallhacking? As for manual review it just does no scale, when you see that CoD banned 100k cheaters, imagine if one person from activision would have to review every cases. Cloud…

Uh oh what would stop my ML-based auto-aim from cheating in FPS running on cloud? Cheats now might be fine with just video feed as input.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#114

Post by f0e4c2f7 »

fletchowns wrote: post #89

I wish there was some well respected third party reputation service that I could prove my identity to (government id, utility statements, etc) and then all games just integrate with this third party reputation service. Sort of an Olympic committee for gaming. Give me the option to only play with other verified players. Getting caught cheating in one game then impacts your reputation in _all_ games. There's a gazillio…

It doesn't work across multiple games but Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has a system where you enter your phone number to verify your account and then can queue only with other verified players.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#115

Post by CapsAdmin »

sevenf0ur wrote: post #87
jtms wrote: post #61

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 behav…

As someone that has played CSGO recently, it's still normal to come across cheaters. Server side cheat prevention is preferred when possible, but there are just too many opportunities for client side cheating in multiplayer FPSs. You can't prevent the client from auto-aiming or knowing the enemy player position behind a nearby wall. If you do not stay on top of cheating, cheaters will ruin your game.

I thought the idea of this deep learning cheat detection was looking for subtle cueues?

Like how someone wall hacking would behave differently from someone who is not. Maybe by reacting before the player is actually seen.

Maybe I'm just thinking it's more impressive than what it actually is.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#116

Post by duncanawoods »

kaladin-jasnah wrote: post #59
sylens wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think at this point I just need a Google Drive client. 1Password is already there, Obsidian is there, I'm ready to go

InSync? Not first party, but I heard everywhere it's really good.

I used InSync with a mounted drive. I rebooted and it ran before the drive mounted and deleted my entire online google drive contents and then deleted the local files when the drive mounted.

The google UI is such garbage that you can't undelete 1000s of files so I had to write a script against it's API that ran for a few days restoring everything. Sucked.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#117

Post by cooljacob204 »

temporarrry0923 wrote: post #64
AustinDev wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be honest I have completely given up on competitive fps games. The cheating situation has only gotten worse and I really don't see anti-cheat makers winning.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#118

Post by judge2020 »

temporarrry0923 wrote: post #98
sevenf0ur wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that has played CSGO recently, it's still normal to come across cheaters. Server side cheat prevention is preferred when possible, but there are just too many opportunities for client side cheating in multiplayer FPSs. You can't prevent the client from auto-aiming or knowing the enemy player position behind a nearby wall. If you do not stay on top of cheating, cheaters will ruin your game.

>You can't prevent the client from auto-aiming or knowing the enemy player position behind a nearby wall Valorant and Edan.gg's defender [1] has the best fog of war system I've ever seen. CSGO has probably the worst; in fact, at one point, the game had NONE and sent player pos's to everyone at all times. I completely agree, but there are a lot of server-side mitigations that haven't been nearly as explored as I'd hop…

I'm a little skeptical that that's the case. When I cheated in CS:GO years ago (1856 days ago in 2016), I specifically remember being unable to see where people went at the beginning of the round, and sniping double-doors on dust2 showed people only when they were about to pass by the opening. This was on official competitive servers, so maybe you only mean self-hosted servers don't have FOW.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#119

Post by kaladin-jasnah »

015a wrote: post #93
peanut_worm wrote: post #7

I could totally see Linux hitting 5+ percent market share for desktops on the next couple years

I'll go on the record and say above 5% by December 31st 2022. Depending on who you ask, its at ~2% today. If that feels high to you, remember: it includes Chromebooks. As it grows, you'll absolutely hear people say "Chromebooks" or "Steam Decks should be their own category, they don't count". These arguments effectively reduce to "Linux cannot be popular, so I'll move the goalposts so it never is." Ignore them, and p…

I'm curious as to why should the Steam Deck be in its own category. To me, it runs a mainstream, open and not-locked-down Linux distro. I could see an argument for Chromebooks being in their own category, but the Steam Deck, in my eyes, is a legitimate "full" Linux device.

Re: Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck

#120

Post by malwrar »

jtms wrote: post #61

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 behav…

I used to write cheats for various source engine games (running vac), and later more interesting games like pubg which run battleeye. Those are two very different anticheats, and I think comparing them is interesting

An important thing to point out is that it requires a lot of reversing work and low level knowledge to make a cheat, and usually at the end of the day cheats all end up with the same core features anyways. This means that there’s a huge stigma amongst cheat developers around knowledge sharing, which makes a lot of that initial work all the more arduous. Anticheats further increase that initial work, and incur an ongoing maintenance cost since each update can break your cheat (especially of you specifically work to break the public methods that everyone is using).

Last time I looked at VAC, it was doing stuff like looking for stuff like modifications to the .text section to detect hooks implemented by writing e.g. jmps to some injected code, but never actually adapted when people started just modifying vtable entries (most source engine constructs are exposed to developers as pure virtual cpp classes). Since they stagnated, it got easier and easier to cheat over time as more and more people spread knowledge on how to hook in an undetected way. Hell, in gmod some lua anticheat developer (gmod is a sandbox game with a lua scripting interface) found a vuln in the clientside lua implementation that allowed arbitrary memory io and used that primitive to implement checks for injected dlls when people started cheating at that level in that game, which was far more effective than VAC ever was.

BE was another universe, it felt extremely prohibitive to touch the game in usermode & even in the kernel I started to feel cramped. You can still totally get past it, but it felt more like writing a very specific rootkit than actually making a cheat.

So, from the other side, anticheats raise the cost of initially developing and maintaining a cheat. If used effectively, they can also kill paysites. I think they have value, even if they aren’t achieving a 99.99999% success rate.

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