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Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

areweanticheatyet.com

151–160 of 485 posts

Re: Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

#151
Amongst the discussion of rootkits and anti-cheat, I would like to add that part of the reason it is necessary is caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers.

It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing, now we're 100% reliant on their ability to do it. So we have anti-cheat which roots our computer, and still doesn't 100% solve the problem.

Re: Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

#152

Is there really no way to make anti-cheat on Linux that can't be bypassed? I don't know much about this, but it seems very difficult to make an anti-cheat for a platform where you can make changes in the kernel.

I mean kernel level anti-cheat doesn't really work on Windows either, its just security theater.

Re: Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

#153

As most of you know, these anti-cheat systems are functionally equivalent to rootkits. There is zero visibility into how these privileges are used for targeted attacks. Due to geographic location of the large game companies this has a geopolitical angle. Fingerprinting of devices and the networks they are in provides a lot of metadata that is most definitely fed into their intelligence apparatus.

Unpopular opinion, but we would be better off with a single open trusted implementation of anti cheat (aka drm) which can attest whatever requirements are desired by the game is met. The only real problem is that it would likely be limited to approved kernel images and someone would need to own that validation and signing infrastructure, but you could imagine having multiple trusted entities have this role.

Re: Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

#154

At this point - you would think that cheaters could be detected on the server side by either training a model to flag abnormal behavior or do some type of statistics on the movement patterns over time - is a client-side anti-cheat really required?

Many forms of cheating revolve around modding the game locally so that certain textures can be seen through walls, so you always know where opponents are. So you aren't breaking any laws of physics, you are just able to make much better tactical decisions.

The obvious solution would be, just don't send data to the player's client about enemies that are behind walls. But this is a surprisingly hard thing to engineer in realtime games without breaking the player experience (see: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-..., and then notice that even in the final video wallhacks are still possible, they're just more delayed).

Re: Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The server also doesen't need to tell you they are behind it if they're sneaking This requires the server to calculate line of sight checks for every player, which is costly, requires loading the entire geometry into the server and would be horribly prone to latency. Then you're looking at potential performance problems on the client due to only knowing about a player the second its in view and having to stream the…

Cs2 and Valorant does this, but start sending positions around corners before they're visible.

CS2 does not do Vischeck culling anymore. It was ditched with the move to source 2. All players are globally visible to everyone

Re: Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

#156
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Client side anti cheats is a lazy excuse why they don't want to spend on server side anti cheats anyway.

How do you stop a client-side wallhack with server side anti-cheat?

run your own servers, an admin watches them track people behind walls, player gets banned, move on. Oh, they took away player run servers...

Re: Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

#157
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is: the Switch has a clear ToS, and if the user breaks it they can get into trouble. OTOH, if you release your game in Linux... that's it

Bad excuse, they could rely on Steam ToS for example.

Creating a steam account is cheap. Needing to buy a new switch is not.

Re: Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

#158
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A trusted entity (probably Valve) could provide a locked down distro where kernel integrity is enforced through secure boot and TPM attestation, but that would mean giving up some control over your own system. There's no guarantee that anything client-side is impossible to bypass of course, but the goal would be to more or less match what Windows offers, which isn't perfect either.

You don't need a full distro, you can just run the game in a VM sandbox with trusted computing extensions alongside whatever distro you want. That breaks cheats that rely on network/memory inspection, you can still cheat using the raw pixel output to drive faked input, but I don't think the loop is closeable there.

Has anyone produced a proof of concept for such a system, for gaming or otherwise?

Given that a certain amount of windows gamers have been having issues making sure their PCs complied with the config requirements for the latest COD/Battlefield, it would seem an even higher bar for a consumer targeted bit of software that needs to do more to be running securely (or add a different mode to your distro install and reboot to it), alongside the wider variety of distros/configs. Distros advertising themselves for gaming or getting people to migrate from windows are also trying to keep barriers to entry low or to appear simple.

Re: Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

#160
post #126

I'm ordering a new laptop to work on LLM stuff, and while I thought about jumping through the hoops to get Linux running with secure boot... I had a realization, it's a cold day in hell when someone else is going to tell me what I can run on my computer. All the latest multiplayer games are now requiring secure boot on Win11 as well I'm actually wary of all these anti-cheats, they're literally hyperinvasive maleware.…

I'm a pretty prolific gamer, but at the start of the year I finally kicked Windows to the curb. It's been fine . Surprisingly few games I'm interested in to begin with have anticheat that doesn't work on Linux, and it's comforting to know games aren't allowed to just shove trash into kernel space at will.

If you play older games, Linux ironically works better than windows now for stability. The only game I have seen any issues with (note I don't really play multiplayer much) is the Harry Potter game, but proton eventually fixed that.
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