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Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

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Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#321

Post by bigstrat2003 »

ryankrage77 wrote: post #268
nathants wrote: post #236

kernel level anticheat is not enough. client inputs have to be trusted, and there is no provenance. the kernel has no visibility of inputs. i’m shipping a 100 player matchmaking game now. clients tick at 360hz, server ticks at 120hz. fair up to 60 ping, which covers entire continents. servers are metal, not vms. epyc 4244p with 2Gbps egress, 1 server per 15 minute game. mitigations=off and nosmt on all clients and th…

I assume this is satire, because nobody would play a game with those requirements.

I wouldn't be so sure. Life has taught me that people will accept damn near anything in order to get the entertainment they want. If you worked your way up to the point OP describes slowly, over time, I wouldn't be at all surprised if people shrugged and said "it's just what you have to do if you want to play those games".

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#322

Post by ethbr1 »

sunshowers wrote: post #217
dbrueck wrote: post #176

The anti-cheat problem is long-running and complicated. If you choose not to run anti-cheat because you understand that these are opaque rootkits, good for you! That's a totally, 100% valid choice. But please keep in mind: - you are a tiny minority and not the target customer - online multiplayer games are an absurdly big business (i.e. there are huge incentives here) - no, you can't completely solve this server side…

While all of what you're saying is true, I think it is worth noting that historically a large chunk of this problem was solved by communities hosting servers. I agree that in the matchmaking era, remote attestation via kernel-level anticheat is the inevitable solution that you converge to after a few iterations. And yes, servers would often kick out people who were too outside of the general skill level, even if they…

> historically a large chunk of this problem was solved by communities hosting servers

Yes and no.

I lived through that era too, and there are serious scaling problems: at some point, trying to banhammer griefers with rotating IPs becomes a full time job, and then the public servers turn into a dumpster fire.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#323

Post by declan_roberts »

WatchDog wrote: post #320

With the way that computer vision and AI continue to improve, I imagine that we will soon have completely external and undetectable cheating peripherals, simply capture the screen direct from the display output, and pass inputs via mimicking a usb human input device. This won’t provide all the same capabilities as cheats that hook into the game process, such as wall hacks, but it would be possible to build a super hu…

That kind of stuff is readily available right now with openCV. Image detection has been very good and very fast for a long time!

Nobody really cares because most players are honest and play to have fun.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#324

Post by Terr_ »

mmis1000 wrote: post #316
Terr_ wrote: post #215

There are two trends in the broader multiplayer game ecosystem which I think are worth highlighting: 1. More games are trying to cut costs with ad-hoc P2P servers, meaning that sometimes important logic is occurring on a not-so-trusted machine. 2. More games are using a revenue model which may be threatened by consumer-side tinkering. For example, imagine a cooperative game that uses a P2P server, and the host has do…

Critical login happen at client machine is how fps games work at all. It's way too late to judge every hit on server due to the latency. A 40ms latency is 3 frame lag even on a 60fps monitor. And It can be a lot worse in a lot of cases. The server may detect some hit that is too far off and impossible. But it have to trust what client says as long as it is on some reasonable range or the game won't even work. And tha…

Did you mean to post that to a different subthread?

I'm familiar with FPS networking, however I'm talking about a trend where a customer-machine is designated to act as a game-server, so that the company can avoid paying to host one in a dedicated but more-secure fashion.

If that machines happens to be the attacker's, then their scope for chicanery is so much greater than just wallhacks or aimbots.

For example, they might temporarily or permanently grant everyone equipment that is otherwise locked behind some grind-wall, where the company hopes to make money selling a "level boost". While not totally malicious, it's definitely a "hack" the company will oppose.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#325

Post by ethbr1 »

dbrueck wrote: post #299
cmxch wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rejoinder: Blizzard’s Warden. No bootkit, no invasive system configuration required, even plays nice with “niche/enthusiast” platforms like Linux, doesn’t even care if your keyboard isn’t a bit niche too. Thought: If they expect a console level of lockdown, why do they bother writing for the PC? If I wanted a $game_console, I’d buy the console.

Hmm... isn't Blizzard's main FPS title Overwatch though? Cheating seems pretty common in that game (and there are tons of forum threads where people are complaining about it).

Forum threads aren't a great measure of cheating though, given the toxicity and inability of the average gamer to admit "the other player was better than me."

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#326

Post by rendaw »

tw04 wrote: post #277
OtomotO wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what I tell my friends. I can't play certain games, because they don't run on Linux and even if they did, I am not gonna install a rootkit to run them.

Ultimately, this is why we have consoles. We can have rootkits, or we can have cheating. Nobody has solved cheat prevention without rootkits. If you can, you’d make millions, if not billions. It’s not like the game creators want to have software on your system that has the potential to brick your system.

This is a false dichotomy. Genshin is single player. Some people play multiplayer only with friends. The only legit use for anti-cheat is competitive multiplayer with strangers.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#327

Post by rxyz »

nathants wrote: post #236

kernel level anticheat is not enough. client inputs have to be trusted, and there is no provenance. the kernel has no visibility of inputs. i’m shipping a 100 player matchmaking game now. clients tick at 360hz, server ticks at 120hz. fair up to 60 ping, which covers entire continents. servers are metal, not vms. epyc 4244p with 2Gbps egress, 1 server per 15 minute game. mitigations=off and nosmt on all clients and th…

I opened the website in his profile and joined the discord.

Yes there's a discord for this.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#328

Post by cascades42 »

steelframe wrote: post #278

I built a separate Arch Linux box just for Steam gaming. I will never log into any of my sensitive accounts -- email, banking, etc. -- on that machine. It's a Framework laptop so I can physically keep the camera and microphone disconnected. I basically treat it like a public terminal.

Yep, same here. I have a dedicated gaming machine because I’m afraid to expose my banking information.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#329

Post by 15155 »

Levitating wrote: post #229
kulahan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't wait to find out what China hid in Riot's Vanguard rootkit for all their games. It's 100% a conspiracy theory, but nobody can convince me it's perfectly clean, or if it is, that there isn't an easy way to add some power to it quietly.

The vanguard drivers are signed by Microsoft, the procedure for which includes a safety audit by Microsoft. The driver is just what the developers say it is (as with all other anti-cheat). It provides an untempered interface for the userland anti-cheat to use to get info from the kernel. Because modern cheats tend to alter the output of kernel syscalls by running in the kernel themselves. I really don't see why anyon…

EAC and other kernel-level anticheat software will dynamically load and execute signed payloads at runtime. Does Vanguard do this? If so, does Microsoft check these payloads?

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#330

Post by [deleted] »

fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #198
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need kernel-level cheats to bypass VAC, nor kernel level anti-cheats to catch cheaters.

>nor kernel level anti-cheats to catch cheaters. Do you have some examples of good anti-cheats that are not kernel-level? Do you have any that are as good as Riot's Vanguard? I'd prefer examples of FPS games since these are the most mechanically skill based compared to other genres that have more strategy, but would like to hear any examples you are thinking of. Lastly, if you say server-side, that may work, but many…

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