Ring 0 of fire: Does Riot Games’ new anti-cheat measure go too far?

> "This isn’t giving us any surveillance capability we didn’t already have," Riot noted in its blog post (using language that isn't exactly comforting on its own). "If we cared about grandma’s secret recipe for the perfect Christmas casserole, we’d find no issue in obtaining it strictly from user-mode and then selling it to The Food Network."

So not only are they injecting kernel level code and running it from boot, but they're being flippant about the level of control this gives them and downplaying the security implications here.

This gives me serious pause, because I have work on my gaming machine too, some of which is confidential client information, and confidential personal information as well. It's getting to the stage that games, a distraction, can't be trusted to be on the same machine as anything else.

Its a rootkit. Hopefully microsoft pushes an update to remove it like they have done for other malware like this in the past.

I have a problem with it, even ignoring the Chinese influence or any direct spyware/vulnerability issues.

If it's seen as a good idea then soon everyone will want to do it and our computers will suddenly be back in the hellscape of 00's browsers. I don't want to know what my computer will be doing when 10 companies' kits are actively competing with each other, the OS, anti-virus etc.

For those who don't know, Riot Games recently released a closed beta of Valorant, their new game with this anti-cheat. Valorant is a direct competitor to Valve's CS:GO, borrowing it's core loop and even some of its weapons.

It's interesting to compare the two approaches to anti-cheat that the two companies are taking here:

* Valve use VAC, an unobstrusive memory scanner in user-space with an emphasis on never having false positives.

* Valve use machine learning on game replays to detect obvious aim-bots and spin-bots

* Valve enlists the community via the "Overwatch" program to review game recordings and spot cheaters.

* Valve supports CS:GO on Linux.

* Leveraging your Steam history, Valve creates a "Trust Factor" score for every player and keeps trusted players together.

* Riot uses ring-0 scanners.

* Riot will not allow you to run Valorant in a VM.

* Riot will ban specific hardware if a cheat is detected. Beware when buying 2nd hand motherboards!

* Riot does not allow you to host your own Valorant servers (this makes hack-vs-hack servers, which some people enjoy, impossible)

I think that in the long run Valve's approach, particularly with Trust Factor, will be proven the better of the two.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc

I've seen that happening with other anti-cheat system in other games.