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We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

mobeigi.com

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Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#61

Post by berbec »

willcipriano wrote: post #42
Night_Thastus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only problem is, a lot of companies do NOT want to pay for it. It's 'treadmill work'. No matter how many people and how much money you throw at the problem, it still ends up just coming back. It's a losing battle because there are many, many more players than there are developers.

My idea: 1. Determine minimum human reaction times and limit movement to within those parameters on the client side. (For example a human can't swing their view around [in a fps] in a microsecond so make that impossible on the client) this will require a lot of user testing to get right, get pro players and push their limits. 2. Build a 'unified field theory' for your game world that is aware of the client side const…

This is a slippery slope which we can view in real-time looking at the speedrunning community. Many current real person runs are using strategies once thought to be computer-only. A Mario run from 2024 would be viewed as totally impossible in 2004.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#62

Post by lagadu »

jsheard wrote: post #56
colechristensen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the better question. When you have software running locally, you can arbitrarily modify how it runs. Like an aimbot is a powerful cheat, and there's no amount of security that can prevent one from being used outside of an anticheat being able to look deep into what your system is doing, what it contains. The only way to prevent that kind of thing is to remove your control of your own computer.

> When you have software running locally, you can arbitrarily modify how it runs. Well, you can on PC at least. Xbox and Playstation security has matured to the point that code modification in online games isn't really a thing anymore, the worst they have to deal with is controller macros most of the time.

Until they get jailbroken that is. There is no such as a perfectly secure platform in which the user has complete physical control over it.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#63

Post by Night_Thastus »

oneplane wrote: post #51
Night_Thastus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheat development these days is incredibly sophisticated. There are swathes of tutorials, old and recent examples to research, advanced inspection tools, etc. It's so much easier to make cheats today than it was, say, 10 years ago. It's also easier because more and more games are sharing common infrastructure like game engines, as compared to the past. What works in one Unreal game may save you a lot of time developi…

Some of the sophistication is not really in the technical breaking of the game or protocol anymore, figuring out if something is plausible might yield detections that you cannot "cheat" because it no longer matters if your cursor clicked on a head at the right time or not, it matters if your posture/reputation/experience makes your behaviour plausible. Cheating and anti-cheat used to rely a lot on the pure technical…

It's hard to balance around those sorts of things. For example, imagine a cheat that gives the player additional info about where enemies are and their state (ie: health). Even if they are of totally normal skill level in terms of movement and aim, that info will allow them to be substantially better than others. How are you going to detect that, and differentiate it from players who simply have a great sense of map awareness and a good ability to keep track of enemies and when to punish them?

Anything that makes assumptions about player's skills runs into problems too. For any online PvP game, the skill ceiling will rise with time. What once may have been considered improbable may soon become what's consistent for the top 1% or even 0.1% of the playerbase given a few years.

As well, it can run into problems as rebalancing occurs and new abilities are released.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#64

Post by GuB-42 »

DJBunnies wrote: post #29
LinuxAmbulance wrote: post #18

Excellent write up and solution. Cheating in video games makes for a wretched experience for those who don't cheat. It's crazy how rampant cheating in multiplayer games, especially competitive ones has gotten. Ten years ago, I thought it was at an extreme, but it's only gone up since then. Part of the problem is that for some software developers, writing cheats brings in a massive amount of money. So instead of some…

I think a better question here is: why is game code so exploitable? A: laziness and cost. It just doesn’t matter the same way that baking code matters, I guess. So they toss on some cheap anti cheat instead of architecting it safely (expensively.)

Priorities. Games need content and performance. Give game developers more budget, and they will work on making the game faster, fix game breaking bugs, and add content rather than make the game less exploitable.

And cheats do not always rely on exploitable bugs. A bot using screen capture and input device emulation works at the OS level and in other contexts (ex: accessibility), it would be a legitimate thing to do.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#65

Post by berbec »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #30
anamexis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there more sophisticated cheat developers though?

Cheat development these days is incredibly sophisticated. There are swathes of tutorials, old and recent examples to research, advanced inspection tools, etc. It's so much easier to make cheats today than it was, say, 10 years ago. It's also easier because more and more games are sharing common infrastructure like game engines, as compared to the past. What works in one Unreal game may save you a lot of time developi…

It can happen in days sometimes.

0: https://www.ign.com/articles/final-fantasy-14s-latest-raid-s...

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#66

Post by jsheard »

lagadu wrote: post #62
jsheard wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you have software running locally, you can arbitrarily modify how it runs. Well, you can on PC at least. Xbox and Playstation security has matured to the point that code modification in online games isn't really a thing anymore, the worst they have to deal with is controller macros most of the time.

Until they get jailbroken that is. There is no such as a perfectly secure platform in which the user has complete physical control over it.

The PS4 and PS5 have been jailbroken numerous times, but...

1) Their secure boot implementation has never been broken, which means you can't upgrade from an exploitable version N firmware to a non-exploitable version N+1 while persisting a backdoor like you could on older systems like the PS3. You're stuck at version N until another exploit is found.

2) They rotate the crypto keys used for online play with every new firmware so they can easily lock those old exploitable firmwares out of online play for good, even if they try to spoof their version number. There's no getting around not having the new keys.

Meanwhile the Xbox One took a decade to get even a limited jailbreak that allows arbitrary code execution inside the game sandbox, but can't escape the game sandbox to take over the kernel, and the Xbox Series systems have yet to be jailbroken at all on any firmware.

Hypothetically being able to break anything with physical access doesn't count for much in practice if the thing you want to physically attack is buried inside a <7nm silicon die, doesn't trust anything outside of itself, and has countermeasures against fault injection attacks. The Switch may well be the last big victory for console hackers, the writing has been on the wall for years now.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#67

Post by LudwigNagasena »

mobeigi wrote: post #15
beeboobaa3 wrote: post #6

> If a player joins with a different Steam ID but with an IP address that is already banned, the system now re-bans them This works great until you realize you're punishing innocent players because of CGNAT and IP addresses getting rotated. Cheaters usually know how to get their router to request a new IP address. That IP address then gets assigned to someone else later.

This scenario definitely did pop up and we would review it on a case by case basis to unban users or make exceptions. However, it was quite rare. Only a handful of reported instances over several months. If our servers were more popular we definitely would have run into it a lot more.

You would need to ban random people and see how many of them report it to estimate the real amount of such errors.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#68

Post by Retr0id »

kemitche wrote: post #52
Retr0id wrote: post #34

> Wonderful, we have found a way to silently persist a cookie for each player as they join the server. This violates GDPR, no? Edit: It sounds like this took place before GDPR was being enforced.

GDPR isn't a blanket ban on cookies. You don't require a cookie notice for strictly necessary cookies, which you have a "grounds of legitimate interest" for: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r... Fraud prevention is listed as an example of a "legitimate interest." So no, by my layman's interpretation, they would not have been bound by GDPR to notify the user of cookies or other fingerprintin…

They're perhaps not required to gather explicit opt-in consent, but my understanding is that they'd be required to disclose what information they collect/store.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#69

Post by connicpu »

kemitche wrote: post #46
leetbulb wrote: post #26

This isn't about stopping cheaters (cheat detection). This is about stopping repeat cheaters trying to ban evade. Detecting cheats, especially nowadays with hardware cheats (DMA, etc), is an entirely different ballgame. IMHO, one of the most effective way to stop ban evaders is to actually charge money for the game.

At the time of the events in the blog, CS:GO was NOT free, and yet there were still cheaters that apparently had access to 80+ accounts.

Why pay for the game when you can go to an onion site that will sell you hundreds of compromised accounts that own the game for a fraction of the price?

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#70

Post by kelnos »

ghxst wrote: post #60
snarfy wrote: post #25

For UT2004, you can ban by player GUID (a hash of the CD key) or IP. With the game abandoned by Epic, a number of key generators have cropped up, which makes GUID bans useless. IP bans only go so far with VPNs costing $2 these days. The main solutions we have today are IP ban + VPN blocking using a database of known VPN subnets and adding them all to the firewall, and a similar fingerprinting technique which scans th…

This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies. Have you considered more advanced network analysis? It's one of the areas I have an interest in (professionally and personally) so if you want any suggestions let me know.

> This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies

Is latency going to be good enough on mobile data (especially if they're also using proxies) for a FPS, though? Sure, they're using cheating software, but I wouldn't be surprised if the software gets the information it needs to cheat too late often enough for it to be useful.

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