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Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

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Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#31

Post by black3r »

bob1029 wrote: post #5

I am not a fan of the signature-based techniques used by VAC, et. al. I've lost a few steam accounts to accurate but unintended (i.e., not actually cheating) detection of debugging tools attached to totally unrelated processes on the same machine. Having anything open like cheat engine or Tsearch while you join a lobby is a guaranteed ban no matter what. Ethical hacking and malicious hacking are indistinguishable fro…

signature detection can also make a false positive if running under Wine or in a VM (that's for example why you can't play League of Legends or Valorant with GeForce Now anymore since Riot revealed their new anti-cheat...)

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#33

Post by stoorafa »

qualeed wrote: post #12
bob1029 wrote: post #5

I am not a fan of the signature-based techniques used by VAC, et. al. I've lost a few steam accounts to accurate but unintended (i.e., not actually cheating) detection of debugging tools attached to totally unrelated processes on the same machine. Having anything open like cheat engine or Tsearch while you join a lobby is a guaranteed ban no matter what. Ethical hacking and malicious hacking are indistinguishable fro…

> If someone at Valve had taken 10 seconds to review my stats It seems super reasonable when it's a one-off thing for your own account. When you think about making it into policy and scaling it up to 1000s of interactions, it quickly becomes unreasonable. > Statistical techniques can dramatically reduce false positives For a period of time, anyways. Until the statistics get gamed by the cheaters (e.g. adjust accuracy…

Computation isn’t likely prohibitive when using the bedrock of predictive models, linear regression, especially w some optimization. Could also vary observation time so you only need a prediction once every ten minutes or whatever

The real issue is the cost of false positive detection of cheating is negligible since the vast majority of positives are probably true positives—it’s the cost of doing anti-cheat business (minimal)

But yes cheats would be modified to just below thresholds of detection

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#34

Post by kube-system »

mystified5016 wrote: post #19
psini wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the sentiment but I can't bring myself to think valve is to blame or should be doing more. Getting a case of "Yes officer, I have an NO2 bottle in my trunk, but what it is plugged to is not actually the air intake for my car but something entirely unrelated, if you just take 2 hours to dig around and take it apart you'll also realize this"

When you're accused of breaking the law, your accuser must prove you have broken the law. If they cannot, there are actions you can take to recoup your damages. Valve can ban you for any or no reason with no means of recourse or refund. Totally the same thing, yeah.

You're right that they're not the same thing. The government has a legal monopoly on the use of force. Valve sells games.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#35

Post by hnlmorg »

malwrar wrote: post #26
rimunroe wrote: post #21

Back in 2000-2005 I was very active in a community centered around 20 or so modded Counter-Strike servers which I volunteered as an admin on. We were generally good about having at least one admin on each server at any given time to deal with cheaters. Occasionally someone wouldn’t be around though. There was a period of time lasting about a month or two where a player with a name like BELT SANDER or ANGLE GRINDER or…

I used to write cheats for CSS & other Source games. Not sure if the original CS would have the same vuln, but iirc you used to be able to use an INetChannel::ReceiveFile function with path traversal to grab the server config. There were a few cool hacks around the file path filtering logic they added in my era that (combined with ::SendFile) enabled a fun period of arbitrary RCE on Source servers. I knew one person…

> Around then was when I decided to start gaming from a VM lol

How?

Maybe I’m getting my dates mixed up but CS was released in the late 90 / early 90s and consumer virtualisation wasn’t nearly good enough to game in for another 10 years.

Consumer CPUs didn’t have virtualisation extensions and GPU paravirtualisation wasn’t available either in the early 2000s.

VMWare wasn’t even any good for just running Windows 2000 (I mean, it was seriously impressive tech for its time, but it was dog slow even for just basic basic things). So you’d be stuck with Xen for anything serious. And that wasn’t trivial to get set up back then.

Plus given the lack of drivers for virtualised hardware like soundcards and network interfaces, you’d likely be stuck with full fat emulation for those devices.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#36

Post by eszed »

SteveNuts wrote: post #30
garrettjoecox wrote: post #9

Years ago for educational purposes I decided to venture down understanding how easy/difficult it was to create a hack for Counterstrike. After just a few hours of watching YouTube tutorials and translating what I could grasp from C/C# into JavaScript (the only language I knew at the time), I had a working Node.js executable that edited memory offsets (using data from hazedumper[1]), letting me see enemies through wal…

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

My perception of the psychology is a malformed competitive drive. Competition is fun! But when it gets someone to the place of "Must win at all costs" it can be life-destroying. For the video game cheats, I think it starts out as "Must beat the other players", but then that gets (mostly) boring once they are actually are beating the other players, and it shifts to "Must beat the anti-cheat system."

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#37

Post by debugnik »

hnlmorg wrote: post #35
malwrar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to write cheats for CSS & other Source games. Not sure if the original CS would have the same vuln, but iirc you used to be able to use an INetChannel::ReceiveFile function with path traversal to grab the server config. There were a few cool hacks around the file path filtering logic they added in my era that (combined with ::SendFile) enabled a fun period of arbitrary RCE on Source servers. I knew one person…

> Around then was when I decided to start gaming from a VM lol How? Maybe I’m getting my dates mixed up but CS was released in the late 90 / early 90s and consumer virtualisation wasn’t nearly good enough to game in for another 10 years. Consumer CPUs didn’t have virtualisation extensions and GPU paravirtualisation wasn’t available either in the early 2000s. VMWare wasn’t even any good for just running Windows 2000 (…

They said Counter Strike: Source, that's 2004-2013. I'm still curious though, if it worked at all performance must have been awful.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#38

Post by cyberax »

debugnik wrote: post #37
hnlmorg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Around then was when I decided to start gaming from a VM lol How? Maybe I’m getting my dates mixed up but CS was released in the late 90 / early 90s and consumer virtualisation wasn’t nearly good enough to game in for another 10 years. Consumer CPUs didn’t have virtualisation extensions and GPU paravirtualisation wasn’t available either in the early 2000s. VMWare wasn’t even any good for just running Windows 2000 (…

They said Counter Strike: Source, that's 2004-2013. I'm still curious though, if it worked at all performance must have been awful.

VMWare supported OpenGL passthrough well enough for the early Source games.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#39

Post by Workaccount2 »

SteveNuts wrote: post #30
garrettjoecox wrote: post #9

Years ago for educational purposes I decided to venture down understanding how easy/difficult it was to create a hack for Counterstrike. After just a few hours of watching YouTube tutorials and translating what I could grasp from C/C# into JavaScript (the only language I knew at the time), I had a working Node.js executable that edited memory offsets (using data from hazedumper[1]), letting me see enemies through wal…

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

For a lot of them, they aren't cheating, they are compensating for bad teammates, bad servers, other cheaters, bad hit reg, bad sound effects, bad whatever they can dream up.

Cheating is "this is my actual skill level if there wasn't so much bullshit happening to me"

Of course this is all a lie, but it's what they tell themselves.

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