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

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

#421

Post by chownie »

throw10920 wrote: post #414
chownie wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re-read the comment but with generosity in your heart? I don't think you need it explained.

> What about everyone else? You didn't answer the GP's question. You talked about what you wanted. The answer to their question is: the majority of people who play competitive matchmade games online have decided that they want anticheat, and disagree with you.

It's funny because this isn't even a hypothetical, you're actually just wrong!

The majority of people who play competitive matchmade games online didn't get consulted, the developers put anti-cheat in after the audience was already entrenched. The players didn't "decide" anything, Riot games decided it in like 2020 and the players have middling to negative feelings about it. You weren't talking about Riot Games? Well you said "majority of people who play competitive matchmade games online" and that's Riot Games, so yes you were.

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

#422

Post by bflesch »

stephen_cagle wrote: post #358
bflesch wrote: post #131

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'm curious, do they have to be? Would it be possible to boot the program + the anti cheat into it's own VM or something? So they know I am running on trusted hardware, but I know that the aren't reading my emails? Genuinely curious and don't know the answer to this.

The anticheat will try to detect the VM and it will give a warning, so that's not a solution. Ideally keep leisure time devices and work devices separate. Consoles are a good solution because you are never tempted to use your emails on those.

But also you need to think about who your adversary is. Other countries have access to all your icloud mail and photos all the time. Something like dropbox and onedrive is scanned and catalogued in the background.

Hardware supply chain is a difficult topic and each layer of abstraction has their own mini operating system in the firmware, and past has shown many of them have backdoors.

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

#423

Post by westpfelia »

nottorp wrote: post #420
simoncion wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I've found a nearly 1:1 correlation between "Does it try hard to be 'competitive' or an 'e-sport'?" and "Is a huge section of the playerbase just godawful toxic assholes?". As the years ground on, I've learned to avoid games billing themselves as an "e-sport" or indicating that they are extremely focused on the "competitive" scene, unless there's something very compelling to offset the asshole players that will…

So all in all Linux gamers are nicer because the “games” requiring anti cheat are not available? They also send better bug reports if you launch Linux in early access, there was this indie dev saying that a couple years ago.

Yea! There was a pretty popular /r/gamedev post talking about how like 95% of the linux bugs existed in windows also. Just that linux users are trained to report and provide quality logs/evidence.

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

#424

Post by littlecranky67 »

MindSpunk wrote: post #408
nevon wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't send the client information about players they should not be able to see based on their current position.

How does it know what isn't visible? Can it handle glass? Frosted glass? Smoke? What if I can't see the player but I can see their shadow? What if I can't see them because they're behind me but I can hear their footsteps? What if I have 50ms ping and the player is invisible after turning a corner because the server hasn't realized I can see them yet? To answer all those questions you either have to render the entire…

GeforceNow begs to differ.

I know, not the same, but IMHO the future of anticheat. We just need faster fiber networks.

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

#425

Post by fragmede »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #424
MindSpunk wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it know what isn't visible? Can it handle glass? Frosted glass? Smoke? What if I can't see the player but I can see their shadow? What if I can't see them because they're behind me but I can hear their footsteps? What if I have 50ms ping and the player is invisible after turning a corner because the server hasn't realized I can see them yet? To answer all those questions you either have to render the entire…

GeforceNow begs to differ. I know, not the same, but IMHO the future of anticheat. We just need faster fiber networks.

Yeah. Stadia worked well in ideal conditions, so for people lucky enough to live that life, the technology's there.

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

#426

Post by sudosysgen »

cortesoft wrote: post #281
bflesch wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kernel anticheat is not really effective because it can be circumvented on the hardware level, for example using direct memory access with a second computer and screen to show the hidden game state. Cheating is a meat space problem and there is no technical solution to it. Thats why in tournaments there are referees standing behind the players. Ultimately it comes down to checking if metrics like reaction speed are h…

This is theoretically possible, but I don't think most cheaters would have the equipment or skill to do this. Cheating is only rampant in games where people can just buy and download cheats... if it requires a lot of skill and hardware, it won't be a big issue.

It's not just theoretically possible, you can buy kits that do this already.

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

#427

Post by littlecranky67 »

fragmede wrote: post #425
littlecranky67 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GeforceNow begs to differ. I know, not the same, but IMHO the future of anticheat. We just need faster fiber networks.

Yeah. Stadia worked well in ideal conditions, so for people lucky enough to live that life, the technology's there.

I never understoof why google gave up so early on cloud gaming. Clearly it is the future, the infrastructure will need to develop but your userbase can grow by the day.

I live a bit remote on an island group, and even though I have a 500Mbit Fiber, my latency to the next GeforceNOW datacenter is 60-70ms (which is my latency to most continental datacenters, so not NVidias fault). That makes it unplayable for i.e. Battlefield 6 (I tried, believe me), but I have been playing Fortnite (which is less aim sensitive) for 100+ hours with that.

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

#428

Post by sudosysgen »

bangaladore wrote: post #295
bflesch wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kernel anticheat is not really effective because it can be circumvented on the hardware level, for example using direct memory access with a second computer and screen to show the hidden game state. Cheating is a meat space problem and there is no technical solution to it. Thats why in tournaments there are referees standing behind the players. Ultimately it comes down to checking if metrics like reaction speed are h…

> Kernel anticheat is not really effective because it can be circumvented on the hardware level, for example using direct memory access with a second computer and screen to show the hidden game state. Incorrect. DMA (direct memory access) is and can be prevented [1] and detected [2]. [1] https://www.faceit.com/en/news/faceit-rollout-of-tpm-secure-... [2] https://community.osr.com/t/detecting-pcie-dma-based-cheatin...

You can still do DMA cheating with IOMMU enabled. There are quite a few relatively widespread bugs with IOMMU that allow you to bypass it, for example https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/fuzzing-pci-expre.... So to be able to actually do IOMMU DMA protection you need to be willing to ban many popular devices. That may be viable for FACEIT and ESEA but it won't be for 99.9% of anticheat deployments.

The detection for DMA cheating is based on the DMA engines being unable to emulate 1:1 the actual behavior the hardware ID would be expected to have. This can be fixed by simply doing that properly.

But even besides that, DMA through PCIe is just one hardware cheat that fits a separate thread model and therefore has some countermeasures.

There are much more robust methods you can use, for example a PCIe interposer between the OS and GPU, or simply direct memory interposes if you want to do DMA without the protections afforded by the PCIe implementation. There are interposets along with machinery to get along memory encryption and other obfuscations that can be made for around 100$.

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

#429

Post by thenthenthen »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #294
thomastjeffery wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are still playing Battlefield 4 (2013) on user-hosted servers. Right now. The only way that "around the world" can be relevant is ping, and the best way to manage ping is by sorting a list of servers by ping. Cheating is an arms race that no one needs to participate in . Moderation was a perfectly good workaround until major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting.

What, 2000 players? 5000? Moderating that game is multiple orders of magnitude off of major titles. No Battlefield game is even in the top 100 of esports earnings.

Studios could release the server files when the game is EOL…

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

#430

Post by thenthenthen »

Kuinox wrote: post #391
jdashg wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did indeed play in the era LanceH is talking about, and I agree with them! We had many thriving communities with no serious cheating problems because of community moderation. Yes, there were poorly moderated servers, but you could simply leave and try a different community until you found one that clicked for you. When you require equal moderation everywhere, you throw the baby out with the bath water.

How much time did you wasted server hopping ?

Initially, until you found the right community run ones? I don't see the issue. Today is worse, especially when there is no server browser but just a blackbox that drops you in a random match.
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