Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach • Hacker News Board

Re: Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach

#31

Post by ButlerianJihad » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 5:14 AM UTC

glitchc wrote: post #27

ChocolateGod wrote: post #3

> Riot went as far as pushing a UEFI firmware update to Valorant players to close a hardware attack — the first time an anti-cheat has reached below the operating system to change your firmware I don't believe Vanguard did this at all? It told users they need to update their firmware to play, it didn't touch the firmware itself. > Cheats started in user space, so anti-cheat moved into the kernel to see them. Cheats f…

Almost all trainers from time immemorial operate in the kernel space because they require direct access to memory addresses. The whole cheats paradigm started with altering values stored at specific addresses. Alter the right value and the player character gets infinite ammo or lives or whatnot, and it went from there. Modern day cheats embed more sophisticated logic that ultimately boils down to altering locations i…

> The whole cheats paradigm

You are limited in envisioning a game where the client device is being trusted for ground truth about the game.

In client-server models, it is possible to limit trust such that many cheat modes and methods are impossible. Furthermore is the “remote GPU streaming” model like Stadia, which nearly obsoletes conventional techno-cheating, and likewise obsoletes kernel-mode anti-cheat.

Re: Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach

#32

Post by vips7L » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 5:25 AM UTC

AgentMasterRace wrote: post #11

what a goof. yes it's a privacy risk, but so is half the things people do on the internet. cs2 is infested with hackers, arc raiders died because of hackers... many games I've played and loved are dead because of hackers.

Hackers were only one of the many straws that killed Arc Raiders. Mostly it was a dev team that didn’t care.

Re: Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach

#33

Post by sushid » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 5:28 AM UTC

sgjohnson wrote: post #25

I’m actually surprised how a lot of commenters here are defending kernel-level anticheat.

Have you played games with a ton of cheaters? It's infuriating, and I'm glad that kernel-level anti-cheat makes it such that you can have an enjoyable gaming experience. Now, I no longer play competitive shooters due to my age, but this was a huge issue back in the day.

Re: Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach

#34

Post by fastball » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 6:02 AM UTC

ronsor wrote: post #23

cowthulhu wrote: post #18

This article reminds me of Chesterton Fence - the author is complaining about something, without ever experiencing why it exists.

Unlike the Fence, kernel anti-cheat wasn't always there and won't be effective in the future with new AI-powered cheats growing.

The analogy of Chesterton's Fence does not imply / require that the fence has been "always there".

Re: Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach

#35

Post by ramon156 » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 6:14 AM UTC

ronsor wrote: post #23

cowthulhu wrote: post #18

This article reminds me of Chesterton Fence - the author is complaining about something, without ever experiencing why it exists.

Unlike the Fence, kernel anti-cheat wasn't always there and won't be effective in the future with new AI-powered cheats growing.

Cheaters are a problem, that's the focus you should be taking, not that KAC is an overreach. Everyone knows its not a solution.

Writing an article about a problem without addressing the problem shows the author never had the problem i. The first place

Re: Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach

#36

Post by Akronymus » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 6:33 AM UTC

sushid wrote: post #33

sgjohnson wrote: post #25

I’m actually surprised how a lot of commenters here are defending kernel-level anticheat.

Have you played games with a ton of cheaters? It's infuriating, and I'm glad that kernel-level anti-cheat makes it such that you can have an enjoyable gaming experience. Now, I no longer play competitive shooters due to my age, but this was a huge issue back in the day.

On private/community hosted/moderated servers my experience was that cheating was mostly a non-issue. Only with the advent of forced matchmaking/only official servers and such has it become a real problem.

Re: Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach

#37

Post by laughing_man » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 7:15 AM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #20

LoganDark wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rhetoric comes up all the time. It goes like this: "if you don't like it, don't buy it." / "don't play it." / "find something else." It's everywhere: don't like non-repairable devices? Well don't buy those then. don't like proprietary operating systems? Well don't use those then. don't like games with anticheats? Well don't play those then. I've found this argument to be entirely antisocial because it completely…

> I don't want to be forced to accept an anticheat for games. I don't want to be forced to play with cheaters due to some people's philosophical concepts of what software I should be allowed to run on my computer when there's technology to radically minimize their numbers for the games I'd like to play. If I want to have a computer that's locked down to be a platform for playing games online with a low likelihood of…

I don't think the vast majority of people who install anti-cheat realize the extent to which they're opening the security kimono.

Re: Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach

#38

Post by laughing_man » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 7:17 AM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #8

anon7000 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s a choice people can make for themselves. Thing is, cheating is an existential threat to the entire business model. Games like Valorant rely on a player base that keeps coming back, and a competitive scene where if you work hard, you can move up the ranks and maybe even make money one day. Players quit over cheating. You log in, you play hard and good, but you just can’t win because there are cheaters.…

> Does Overwatch have a bigger cheating problem? Yes, considerably. One can also look at Counterstrike running on Valve's matchmaking which uses userland cheat detection versus Faceit's kernel level anticheats for the exact same game. It's been incredibly rare for me to run into obvious cheaters on Faceit but I'll often run into cheaters in Valve's matchmaking. It's the same game, the same executables.

I finally stopped playing Counterstrike because of all the cheating. It was difficult enough to detect that I never knew when I got killed because someone was good, because they were lucky, or because they were cheating.

Re: Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach

#39

Post by dannersy » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 7:17 AM UTC

Akronymus wrote: post #36

sushid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you played games with a ton of cheaters? It's infuriating, and I'm glad that kernel-level anti-cheat makes it such that you can have an enjoyable gaming experience. Now, I no longer play competitive shooters due to my age, but this was a huge issue back in the day.

On private/community hosted/moderated servers my experience was that cheating was mostly a non-issue. Only with the advent of forced matchmaking/only official servers and such has it become a real problem.

I think this is the answer. You get a lot more false positives, but at least the players can do something about it and aren't at the mercy of devs who can stop support at any time and also are fighting a losing battle.

Re: Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach

#40

Post by charcircuit » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 7:18 AM UTC

The overreach of kernel anticheats that this article complains about can be done just as easily from user mode anticheats. It's not whether an anticheat is kernel mode or not for whether it is overreaching or not.

>The hardware requirements lock out Linux and the Steam Deck

Because their security is out of date. Meanwhile macOS has modern security good enough to not even require Vanguard to need kernel mode to be effective.