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Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

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Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#61

Post by ndriscoll »

senectus1 wrote: post #48
ndriscoll wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need self hosted servers? Most looter shooters are p2p in game, right? Either way, you just need a filter to allow matching with other people that have anti cheat off. Or at least allow private groups in that mode.

its been a while but from memory the EAC is mandatory. you cant launch or play without anti cheat. its not an option.

Right, that's the criticism. Games used to make it optional. Why'd they stop (I suppose so they can sell you things like skins that you could otherwise just mod in like people used to)?

They used to be about having fun. If you wanted to put gravity at 10% and make everyone use only rocket launchers with unlimited ammo, that fell within the parameters of having fun:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uo7-qyfeThU

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#62

Post by wizzwizz4 »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #34
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only information an online game-engine should be pulling is the hashed GPU chip serial-number for account ban enforcement. Isn't that literally client-side security enforcement?

1. Submitting an already active card signature is an instant ban 2. Spoofing a signature will still force you to re-register, lose your current rankings, and zero your nontransferable e-store account balance. 3. Most people don't account for the other system signatures that will also get randomly audited over several months 4. Remember part of offline audits is comparing each clients game-log to look for suspicious g…

Are you saying that accounts should match one-to-one to GPUs, and that two instances of the game can't run on the same machine at once? These assumptions are unrealistic: what if I upgrade my graphics card? What if my friend wants to play too, and remotes into my machine to do so?

And I don't understand which cheating behaviours this restriction is supposed to prevent.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#63

Post by j-bos »

Anti cheat software because one needs to play with people one does not trust and so attempts to get good behavior from strangers by force.

Should Magnus Carlsen have required Niemman to get a cavity search? When tons of kids have neuralink implants, should they be polygraphed before taking a spelling test?

Cheating is not a technical problem, it's a people problem.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#64

Post by thayne »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #13

A perk of gamimg on Linux is that none of these invasive anti-cheats work. I consider that a plus since I never care enough about a video game to surrender my privacy or my kernel over to it.

On the flip side, I am really annoyed about games that require anti-cheat, especially if I would just play them single player, because it makes it harder or impossible to play them on Linux.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#65

Post by neandrake »

j-bos wrote: post #63

Anti cheat software because one needs to play with people one does not trust and so attempts to get good behavior from strangers by force. Should Magnus Carlsen have required Niemman to get a cavity search? When tons of kids have neuralink implants, should they be polygraphed before taking a spelling test? Cheating is not a technical problem, it's a people problem.

I mean, the same goes for all crime being a people problem. The anti-cheat keeps honest people honest as they say.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#66

Post by lathiat »

hipadev23 wrote: post #59
andrewflnr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you would only need to sanitize control inputs I'm pretty far from the multiplayer game dev scene, but isn't this close to how a lot of multi player sync works anyway? Just* distribute everyone's control inputs and have them all run a deterministic simulation. And then I guess you would run the same input cheat detection on all the honest clients, which are hopefully the majority... Is this impossible or did I just…

A common cheat in FPS games watches the rendered frame and sends mouse input to aim+fire. The server being authoritative doesn’t help in this situation. These sort of cheats are often entirely out of band, running on a mirror of the video stream on a second machine, and transmitting user input back via USB. Clientside snooping won’t catch it either.

Yep.. "DMA" direct memory access.. reading the HDMI output, simulating controllers.. it all exists.

The google term is "hardware cheats"

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#67

Post by Joel_Mckay »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #62
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Submitting an already active card signature is an instant ban 2. Spoofing a signature will still force you to re-register, lose your current rankings, and zero your nontransferable e-store account balance. 3. Most people don't account for the other system signatures that will also get randomly audited over several months 4. Remember part of offline audits is comparing each clients game-log to look for suspicious g…

Are you saying that accounts should match one-to-one to GPUs, and that two instances of the game can't run on the same machine at once? These assumptions are unrealistic: what if I upgrade my graphics card? What if my friend wants to play too, and remotes into my machine to do so? And I don't understand which cheating behaviours this restriction is supposed to prevent.

No, there should only be 1 GPU with a specific signature active at any given time.

If multiple user accounts are tainted by the same flagged signatures, than you risk getting everyone on that hardware banned. It is usually clearly stated in the EULA expected fair play section, and it is at the admins discretion... Buy that used cheap rtx3090 at your own risk... ;)

"two instances of the game can't run on the same machine at once?"

In general, most performance heavy platforms are not going to support multi-account mode anyways.

"what if I upgrade my graphics card?"

Your associated hardware signature would simply be updated upon login. However, accounts associated with flagged signatures often remain inactive to block logins/new-account-registration/store-access.

"What if my friend wants to play too, and remotes into my machine to do so?"

Depends how the admins enforce the signature collision events. In most cases, all users will get a 1 week ban, and a warning a 1 year ban will follow. Again, the admins usually have discretion about believing users stories...

"And I don't understand which cheating behaviours this restriction is supposed to prevent"

It helps prevent persistent cheats returning their hardware purchases, re-registering, and continuing to annoy other players.

This is a very common practice on Desktops, but rare on console games for obvious reasons. =3

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#68

Post by snvzz »

>ACE overall is a treasure trove of privacy violations: checking recently used files, uploading files to their servers, banning having reverse engineering tools open, or having used them recently on game files—the list goes on.

Microsoft should blacklist these binaries, and revoke developer certificate.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#70

Post by nvy »

BearOso wrote: post #7

The screenshot function pointed in the article out will only be able to take screenshots on older versions of Windows with no compositor, i.e. the ones that draw directly to the scan-out framebuffer. That's why he found it's not used anywhere--it's obsolete.

Looking at the MSDN docs I don't believe this is true. Can you point to something showing it doesn't work on modern windows?

My only windows box is in an actual physical box right now and I cannot verify.

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