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Anticheat Update Tracking

not-matthias.github.io

31–40 of 69 posts

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#31
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a number of good reasons not to make everyone run a kernel level anti-cheat. Linux (and therefore SteamOS) compatibility is a big one. I think the status quo where anyone on any platform can access the vanilla game -- where cheaters may not even be a huge problem depending on one's skill rating -- and the most competitively-minded players have the choice to play on FACEIT, works pretty fine. I do wonder what…

To be fair in the specific case of CS2, the normal modes without FACEIT are really barely playable. Most games are just a massive loss or win, depending on who has the suspiciously good player with 100 hours in their team.

Most fps games when you get high enough rating are this :/

It also doesn't help most streamers have soft aim lock so that's everyone thinks is normal.

I swear fps games have been in the steroid baseball era for years and it'll be interesting if it ever comes out.

There's also a financial incentive to not reveal 25% of the player base is cheating both in the immediate loss of player base and the inability to simultaneously prove it's happening in all the competitors.

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#32
post #4

Very nice walk-through on the reverse engineering process. Also, they linked this post that made my jaw drop: https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/667333-... Apparantly BattleEye anti-cheat had an exploit where hackers could permanently ban any player they wanted. BattleEye allowed anybody to log in as a "game server" so hackers simply booted up a fake server, told BattleEye that "player X has logged…

It's crazy that people allow this stuff to effectively run as root. One of these companies is going to have a vulnerability that lets other players run code on your machine in kernel mode.

It's kind of amusing to me how some PC gamers act superior to console gamers because PC gamers run their games on a flexible, customizable, general-purpose machine that the user controls rather than an appliance... and then immediately hand over control to half a dozen companies at a level that reduces "their" PC to a vendor-owned appliance anyway.

If you are a PC gamer and run anti-cheat software like this, you should probably think of your gaming PC as a much more powerful and much jankier console, and avoid running or storing anything on it other than your games.

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#34

Forgive my ignorance, but why don’t game developers put more effort into limiting the amount of data accessible to the client (restricting it only to what’s reasonably necessary)? For example, couldn’t more movement physics be validated or handled server side? Cheats might still be able to read some data from the game process, but ideally, they’d be limited to issuing inputs like any other player, based only on the s…

You don't want clients suffering a bad experience because they don't have gigabit internet

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#35
post #12
post #11

Ehh, pretty sad there's almost no information on FACEIT anti-cheat. One of the most impactful out there. Wonder if it's just the invasiveness that separates it. Valve can't replicate even part of it, while CS2 game modes are flooded with cheaters. Most people who chase competitiveness (which CS used to be all about – now it's also skins) just install FACEIT directly and ignore 90% of built-in game content. Maybe Valv…

There's a number of good reasons not to make everyone run a kernel level anti-cheat. Linux (and therefore SteamOS) compatibility is a big one. I think the status quo where anyone on any platform can access the vanilla game -- where cheaters may not even be a huge problem depending on one's skill rating -- and the most competitively-minded players have the choice to play on FACEIT, works pretty fine. I do wonder what…

EAC supports Linux nowadays, but developers have to manually check the box to enable it.

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#37
post #33

Isn't the age or kernel level anti-cheat tech coming to an end, thanks to Crowdstrike mishap a year ago?

MS is trying to limit kernel exposure: https://www.theverge.com/news/692637/microsoft-windows-kerne...

I doubt they'll end kernel-level AC, though. At best, they'll get more stable kernel-level anti cheat because better APIs are available. Anti-cheat software would run as a hypervisor if it could, and even then it wouldn't have enough access to catch all cheaters.

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#38
post #34

Forgive my ignorance, but why don’t game developers put more effort into limiting the amount of data accessible to the client (restricting it only to what’s reasonably necessary)? For example, couldn’t more movement physics be validated or handled server side? Cheats might still be able to read some data from the game process, but ideally, they’d be limited to issuing inputs like any other player, based only on the s…

You don't want clients suffering a bad experience because they don't have gigabit internet

Games hardly eat up more than a megabit of bandwidth in practice, unless you start streaming. Even streaming games from the cloud to your computer will usually take less than 20-30mbps.

Latency is the real killer, though. A 10ms round trip + a few ms of simulation time at 144Hz will have physics objects "correct" their position after 4-5 frames have already been rendered. Bump that up to 30ms (still a perfectly common amount of latency) and you're reverting objects after 10 frames of animation.

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#39
post #34

Forgive my ignorance, but why don’t game developers put more effort into limiting the amount of data accessible to the client (restricting it only to what’s reasonably necessary)? For example, couldn’t more movement physics be validated or handled server side? Cheats might still be able to read some data from the game process, but ideally, they’d be limited to issuing inputs like any other player, based only on the s…

You don't want clients suffering a bad experience because they don't have gigabit internet

The true killer is latency; the dominance of WiFi, and now the rise of home 5G internet.

People who play Counter-Strike with their wifi router 3 floors below them in the basement under a pile of laundry will go on a crusade to complain as loudly and relentlessly as possible for Valve to "fix the fucking hit reg".

People have -zero- technical knowledge and get incredibly angry that they died to someone they didn't even see.

Re: Anticheat Update Tracking

#40
post #35
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a number of good reasons not to make everyone run a kernel level anti-cheat. Linux (and therefore SteamOS) compatibility is a big one. I think the status quo where anyone on any platform can access the vanilla game -- where cheaters may not even be a huge problem depending on one's skill rating -- and the most competitively-minded players have the choice to play on FACEIT, works pretty fine. I do wonder what…

EAC supports Linux nowadays, but developers have to manually check the box to enable it.

EAC on Linux doesn't run in the kernel, it's all userspace. Which is part of the reason some developers choose not to accept EAC on Linux.
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