231–240 of 485 posts
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How do you stop a client-side wallhack with server side anti-cheat?
Don't send the client information about players they should not be able to see based on their current position.
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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.
Those things are all possible, but really the only entity that has the power to realistically do them is the OEM - Valve could do it for SteamOS, but only on it's own hardware.
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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.
Running in a VM is not secure by itself. You need something similar to what Android is building via protected VMs.
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.…
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% s…
The reason it's necessary is because players want to be able to play with/against other players around the world. Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Running your own server as admin can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today.
And cheating is an arms race. It's just hacking. You either preserve game integrity or you're going to have cheaters.
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.
Linux will never compete here.
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Seems more likely that the cause is that RTS isn't a popular genre among gamers and Beyond All Reason is obscure[1] even among RTSes. There's no fame or money to make it worth investing in cheating. [1] Among the general public, not RTS aficionados. Which is unfortunate; Total Annihilation and its spiritual descendants like BAR deserve more love.
People have been banned for cheating, so cheats exist.
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They are functionally equivalent for the player. The problem with player hosted servers is that it was very hard to get a fair and balanced competitive match, where now it's extremely common with matchmaking on servers hosted by the game company.
Back then at least you could do something about it. Now if there's an obvious cheater you just kinda sit there and take your L, and ask people to make reports.
Back then, the most common option taken was leaving the server to find another one.
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.
I remember trying to install Valorant for the first time, and its ridiculously invasive anticheat kernel mod (or whatever it's called) gave me my first blue (or was it red??) screen I'd seen on Windows in years. Immediately uninstalled it and haven't ever played Valorant to this day. Fuck that crap, if your community is so toxic that you need a rootkit to keep cheaters at bay, then maybe it's more of a community prob…
It's nothing to do with a toxic community.
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They are functionally equivalent for the player. The problem with player hosted servers is that it was very hard to get a fair and balanced competitive match, where now it's extremely common with matchmaking on servers hosted by the game company.
They are not functionally equivalent, unless there are games I'm not familiar with where custom lobbies are published in a list for strangers to join. Normally a custom lobby implies invite only. Not everyone is interested in a "fair and balanced competitive match" where you're guaranteed to win no more and no less than 50% of the time. I actually find that intolerably boring.
Lots of the mosts played competitive games have that, or third party websites/discords that have links to custom lobbies.