Epic launches anti-cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by Macha » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 10:36 PM UTC

stinkytaco wrote: post #43

WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #26

This is fantastic news. Now I just need punkbuster. If I can play Planetside2 on Linux I can just ignore games that don't work well on Linux. I can't wait to delete windows, it does nothing for me professionally or personally outside of being a gamebox. I find between the spyware, bluescreens when trying to move a boot drive to a new box, explorer.exe is a miserable excuse of a desktop and... I could go on about the…

> I find between the spyware, bluescreens when trying to move a boot drive to a new box, explorer.exe I worry that EAC basically amounts to spyware, however. Also, and this is off topic, but I think Windows Explorer is the best GUI file manager on any platform. Shoot me.

It's better than Finder, but I'd have a hard time picking it over Dolphin.

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

#212

Post by rasz » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

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.

You can track statistics of players aiming at same spot in enemy model every time, looking directly at other players behind obstacles outside sound range, you can send probes with bogus player position data behind a wall from suspect player and analyze reaction.

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

#213

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 11:03 PM UTC

bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #165

dfxm12 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to open up yourself to risk for your identity being stolen and normalize handing out personally identifiable information just to maybe make it harder for cheaters to get in on some of your games? I don't think the idea has merit. See how long it is taking the Real ID act to become enforced. People barely trust the government with this info, with the ability to get on a plane (among other things) at stake.

Thanks to the magic of cryptography, it's possible to prove your identity to someone else without enabling them to impersonate you. For instance, the third party gives you a nonce, you sign it with your private key, and they verify it with your public key.

Then I can make one key per game.

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

#214

Post by fletchowns » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 11:06 PM UTC

dfxm12 wrote: post #145

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…

You want to open up yourself to risk for your identity being stolen and normalize handing out personally identifiable information just to maybe make it harder for cheaters to get in on some of your games? I don't think the idea has merit. See how long it is taking the Real ID act to become enforced. People barely trust the government with this info, with the ability to get on a plane (among other things) at stake.

If you get financing on purchasing a car you have to give financial institutions your personal information, I don't see this as being any worse. Even companies that I'd prefer not to do business with have all my personal details, because there isn't really any alternative. My identity was stolen as part of the Equifax breach. Certain organizations are more reputable than others, and I want this gaming reputation service to be well respected and trustworthy, since that's the only way something like this can work. It's hard to get right, but it can be done.

The alternative is having to run third party closed source anti-cheat software on my computer that is written by god knows who, that has the potential to do an enormous amount of damage if a bad actor were to sneak in a backdoor.

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

#215

Post by coolspot » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 11:07 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #83

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

Why would you run Linux and use Google Drive? If you don't care about FAAN(M)G reading your data and activity, Windows is simpler and has better compatibility.

EncFS over GDrive/Dropbox is great!

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

#216

Post by jay_kyburz » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

tester756 wrote: post #192

temporarrry0923 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, it's a bezier curve with some random noise, I oversimplified.

> random noise I thought about randomness, but cannot randomness be detected? e.g you add +- 5 pixels horizontally/vertically so with 30min game sample cannot it be detected? e.g when collecting only when enemy is on screen

The hosts are so cheap they wont do a raycast from a player to an object to see if its in line of sight, they are not going to try and scan your input looking for randomness.

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

#217

Post by reanimus » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 11:11 PM UTC

m4rtink wrote: post #185

reanimus wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be shocked if it used BPF probes or something like that. A kernel module is possible, too, especially if they're targeting Ubuntu with DKMS.

Good luck getting custom kernel modules working with secure boot.

I don't know if you're being sincere or just trying to gotcha it, but Ubuntu has had support for this for ages as part of DKMS [0]. It generates a key and registers it with the firmware during setup if secure boot is on, and it signs any modules you build with that key as part of the regular DKMS build.

[0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot#MOK_generation_and_s...

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

#218

Post by rcoveson » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 11:12 PM UTC

tablespoon wrote: post #207

judge2020 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably necessary when cheats people install themselves are actual rootkits.

> Arguably necessary when cheats people install themselves are actual rootkits. There's a hardware cheat that's actually in the wild that uses a capture card, computer vision, and hardware input devices to run entirely outside the OS: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/cheat-maker-brags-of-...

With all my heart, I'm rooting for the authors of this approach. Anti-cheat and DRM hide behind the defense of practicality and cost efficiency, but these products are absolutely evil. As personal computers are becoming more and more an extension of our bodies and minds, it is essential that they act in our interests and nobody else's. Imagine a prosthetic leg that phoned the insurance company if it detected illegal drugs in your blood. That's how I feel about these rootkit anti-cheats.

So please, let the cheaters turn to human-interface cheating methods. Force companies to deal with these problems in the proper way, like any other security problem: Don't trust the client at all. Infecting the client with your own agents is not an option. Can't make it work? Then use a different business model. Have your users put time and money into the game, and require more time and money the higher up the ranked ladder they climb. If they're buying as many in-game cosmetics as the average user, and playing for as much time as the average user must to reach a given level, then they never notice. If not, don't let them climb the ladder until they do. If they get reported by other players as cheaters, and manual validation confirms it, then they lose their investment. With that approach, you could have the most obviously hacked account in the world and it wouldn't be able to impact anybody for long without covering the costs of its own detection and banning.

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

#219

Post by max46 » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 11:18 PM UTC

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…

this type of solution sounds good until you get hit by a false positive in a game.

happened to me on pugb and the only way I could get my account back was with a paypal charge back. It's very typical that game companies refuse to tell users what triggered it or how to avoid it in the future. For all I know, it could have been a scam from the devs.

I can live with a 40 - 60$ loss on a game, but losing the ability to play all games on protected servers forever would be really bad

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

#220

Post by fletchowns » Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 11:22 PM UTC

max46 wrote: post #219

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…

this type of solution sounds good until you get hit by a false positive in a game. happened to me on pugb and the only way I could get my account back was with a paypal charge back. It's very typical that game companies refuse to tell users what triggered it or how to avoid it in the future. For all I know, it could have been a scam from the devs. I can live with a 40 - 60$ loss on a game, but losing the ability to p…

Yup it's a valid point, that's why I made sure to call out in my original comment. So many little details that would need to be done right in order to make it work.

It's an impossible task for every game studio to get all those details right, that's why I think it needs to be centralized. That way game studios can just worry about making cool games, and not having to waste resources on this endless arms race of cheating.