21–30 of 142 posts
Separating out the requirement to run games, from the general-purpose computing requirements, opens up more options. It also pushes fewer people towards buying into Windows way of life for everything desktop/laptop.
> This isn’t giving us any surveillance capability we didn’t already have. I think this is an important line. Regardless of how people feel about anti-cheating efforts, I don't believe many people realize how much access games already have to their system to the point where it's kind of a miracle there aren't more malicious games out in the wild.
Does Microsoft have to approve these drivers? I would argue Microsoft should not allow this kind of thing if they really want to provide security. Apple would never approve such a mechanism, for sure.
Apple do allow this through kernel extensions, but its very much opt in from users.
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/de...
No matter how low-level they get in the OS, this is ultimately a losing battle. Aimbots have gone analog (src: https://hackaday.com/2022/04/30/aimbot-does-it-in-hardware/ ) What can they do next? Demand webcam access with your mouse visible, I guess?
I could see a webcam pointed at your hand/keyboard to verify input being something legit players would happily opt into.
Not to mention that you would have to comb through all this footage to detect cheaters... It is honestly a laughable solution.
> Now, while most players might find the idea of a corrupted Windows installation objectionable, a disturbing number of cheaters have shown themselves to be downright enthusiastic about the opportunity to jump onto some guy’s botnet in exchange for the ability to orbwalk. So they acknowledge that running third-party stuff in kernel mode increases the likelihood your machine gets owned by malware, in the very same blo…
Not to mention them saying "if you use AAA games, you may already have such a thing running already so one more won't kill you." whereas, in real life, it increases the odds that a system will get hacked due to it since the attack surface increases (The number of bugs in "EA+Riot" could not be less than "EA", but could be higher, and the other way around)
Bullshit. In real life nobody will hack you with a videogame anticheat kernel driver exploit.
They will hack you with a browser exploit, a ms office exploit, or just because you downloaded a malicious executable and decided to run it.
> Now, while most players might find the idea of a corrupted Windows installation objectionable, a disturbing number of cheaters have shown themselves to be downright enthusiastic about the opportunity to jump onto some guy’s botnet in exchange for the ability to orbwalk. So they acknowledge that running third-party stuff in kernel mode increases the likelihood your machine gets owned by malware, in the very same blo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference in effort, for a cheater, between installing a cheat as a user process and a kernel driver is about one button click. I can decide to cheat, stick my CC info into a website and download a program in less than 5 minutes. To get hardware I need to provide my shipping info and wait a couple of days. If the hardware is banned, I need to wait a few days before my replacement hardware is there, or with softw…
> If the hardware is banned, I need to wait a few days before my replacement hardware is there, or with software I just update and restart. Except perhaps the first few iterations, the hardware won’t be banned. You’ll just have to load a software update for your DMA hardware.
> Now, while most players might find the idea of a corrupted Windows installation objectionable, a disturbing number of cheaters have shown themselves to be downright enthusiastic about the opportunity to jump onto some guy’s botnet in exchange for the ability to orbwalk. So they acknowledge that running third-party stuff in kernel mode increases the likelihood your machine gets owned by malware, in the very same blo…
The implication is that Riot only stands to gain a small amount of money if they decide to actually start a botnet using their customers' machines, with a lot of risk of lawsuit/bad PR if they do so; and that cheap cheat makers, due to their already-shady business and anonymity, are more likely to start selling botnet access on the side to make extra cash.
Of course, this is just a blog post by a gaming company for their gamer audience, but lots of this stuff is downright dishonest. For example: > Now, while most players might find the idea of a corrupted Windows installation objectionable, a disturbing number of cheaters have shown themselves to be downright enthusiastic about the opportunity to jump onto some guy’s botnet in exchange for the ability to orbwalk Kernel…
No matter how low-level they get in the OS, this is ultimately a losing battle. Aimbots have gone analog (src: https://hackaday.com/2022/04/30/aimbot-does-it-in-hardware/ ) What can they do next? Demand webcam access with your mouse visible, I guess?
The difference in effort, for a cheater, between installing a cheat as a user process and a kernel driver is about one button click. I can decide to cheat, stick my CC info into a website and download a program in less than 5 minutes. To get hardware I need to provide my shipping info and wait a couple of days. If the hardware is banned, I need to wait a few days before my replacement hardware is there, or with softw…
Security-by-obscurity is a game of cat-and-mouse where the cat is blind and the mouse is invulnerable.