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Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

areweanticheatyet.com

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Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#101

Post by Starz0r »

Cortex5936 wrote: post #91
Starz0r wrote: post #73

What an interesting day when you see a site you've worked on for the past 2 (3?) years get posted to HN! Except I tried submitting this site years ago when I had just finished it, but it did not seem like HN was that interested at the time, and I don't blame them. It was very niche and video game related, and the site also looked a lot worse. It's come a long way to the point where there where I collaborated with som…

To play the devil's advocate here, do you think enabling EC on Linux systems makes it easier for players to cheat ?

Yes.

But, in practice, it usually doesn't result in any new cheaters. There is a myriad of reasons for this, but I won't go over them here.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#102

Post by maccard »

Animats wrote: post #5
mjevans wrote: post #2

I don't know enough about 'real time' netcode for games. However I have read several HN articles over the years so I've got at least a basic understanding. Why can't the servers distrust the clients? What should a 'client side anti cheat' actually prevent? The way I think I'd tackle such things is to have multiple copies of each character model moving in different locations and different ways. Such that trying to spy…

> Why can't the servers distrust the clients? What should a 'client side anti cheat' actually prevent? There are two issues. One is the user seeing things that the server is hiding, such as enemies hidden behind obstacles, by going into "wireframe mode". The other is superhuman performance via computer assistance, or "aimbot hacks". The first is a performance issue. The server can do some occlusion culling to avoid t…

The performance issue you talk about has a little more to it too. If the server is 30ms away from you and the other player, and the server runs at 30Hz there’s 90ms between the enemy pressing a key and you seeing it. That’s before you add real world networking conditions into the mix and have to start adding client side prediction in which adds a few more MS to boot, or errors. But in order to do this prediction the client needs a little more state than is visible on screen - players that are around corners that are about to appear, that sort of stuff. So the client needs that information in order to actually function meaning it’s hard/impossible to tell the difference between good game sense (I know the reload time of this gun is X and that peeking lasts Y frames and they will appear here) and cheating (we’re 2 frames away from showing the player on screen but he’s going to be right here so shoot here)

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#103

Post by dncornholio »

roshankhan28 wrote: post #74

the best anti cheat that i have experience is vangaurd by riot games. I was running a python script in background for web crawling, left it on and guess what? my account got banned. the support says the vangaurd found a script running. i explained them patiently that it was a web crawling script , still no use.

It also sends screenshots of the websites you have open (if it wants to).

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#104

Post by Strom »

Reubend wrote: post #85
progx wrote: post #78

Anti-Cheat will not help, if the games not Update it for more than 8 month. And one thing the devs could do without Anti-Cheat, is to automate analysis of e. g. head shot rate, movement speed, etc. but most games not do that. If average player make 25 Kills per hour in a game and some 150 over longer periods i did not need an anti cheat to do something.

This is a common misconception. Some players are extremely good at video games, and they look like statistic anomalies / outlier when mapped across the full distribution of players. Consider, for example, professional gamers. They spend countless hours practicing, and they can easily outcompete casual gamers who don't have the time to refine their skills daily. Statistical anti cheat is extremely weak in any game whe…

Extremely good players have old profiles that they have used for a long time, gradually getting better. Cheaters are either using a new profile, or an old profile with bad stats that then has a sharp uptick.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#105

Post by maccard »

msnkarthik wrote: post #52
rpgwaiter wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m big into competitive Call of Duty. On that game (and any other shooter that uses a controller), the biggest undetectable cheat is auto recoil adjust. People call it a “chronus” for the same reason people call it Kleenex. You download profiles for the gun you're using and it basically does the recoil pattern in reverse, turning every gun into a laser beam. It’s undetectable because it modifies inputs from a legit…

your point about "chronus" or auto recoil adjust cheats is a perfect example of how cheats evolve to bypass detection. By modifying controller inputs at the hardware level, it’s nearly impossible for traditional anti-cheat software to identify such exploits. It shows that as long as there is an incentive, people will find creative ways to gain an advantage, often blurring the line between legitimate skill and unfair…

Cheating isn’t a binary thing , it’s a spectrum. The number of people who are willing to install a random script that they drop into a folder that lets them win every Br game is vastly higher than the number who will install a kernel level driver, which is more than will _pay for_ and keep updated with a kernel level driver. Currently, “expensive dedicated hardware that replaces the gaming mouse that I like using” is significantly less of a problem than “install rootkit”

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#106

Post by doix »

cherryteastain wrote: post #92
hexomancer wrote: post #50

One thing I don't understand and I would really appreciate if someone could explain this to me. Why do we need separate anti-cheat programs? Can't the operating systems simply have an option when creating a process that prevents all operations looking at the memory of the process (and maybe if such a process is about to be launched the user has to explicitly accept that by clicking a button)? Wouldn't that stop almos…

> Can't the operating systems simply have an option when creating a process that prevents all operations looking at the memory of the process Already the case for userspace programs, due to virtual memory > those programs have to use OS facilities to mess with the game anyway. Cheats today essentially are like drivers, they do not run as userspace programs. Hence, they can do literally anything on your computer. In t…

> Already the case for userspace programs, due to virtual memory

Userspace programs can read other userspace programs memory, it's part of the standard win32 api[0].

> Cheats today essentially are like drivers, they do not run as userspace programs. Hence, they can do literally anything on your computer. In terms of privileges, driver code runs at a level as privileged as the operating system. Hence the need for programs that run at the level of the OS kernel to catch the cheats.

Some cheats nowadays do this, but they do this because of anti cheat programs. If there were no anti-cheat programs, they wouldn't have to do this.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/memoryap...

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#107

Post by BlueTemplar »

maccard wrote: post #96
BlueTemplar wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"at scale" assumes a popular game - and you end up by giving as an example one of the most popular FPSes ever ! Please give an example of a game with, say, less than a million of copies sold / given away ? (And ideally, not an FPS, we all know these have specific extra challenges involved.) And "at scale" pretty much means that matches are not competitive, because the sums required for entering a tournament game and…

But popular games are the ones people want to play, and are the ones you’re claiming are immune to this. Look at this comments section - it’s people talking about the top 3-5 games on Pc right now, not the 30th entry in the trending FPS section. Part of the appeal for cheating is doing it where it has impact - in popular games.

Where did I claim this ?

Also, I want to insist on one thing : some of the popular games listed are those that are online-only and/or removed the ability to host your own servers (and/or even worse, have microtransactions).

I have zero sympathy for the kind of asshole that gave money to companies engaging in the despicable behaviour cited above. You were warned. You made your own bed, now lie in it !

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#108

Post by shaokind »

Starz0r wrote: post #73

What an interesting day when you see a site you've worked on for the past 2 (3?) years get posted to HN! Except I tried submitting this site years ago when I had just finished it, but it did not seem like HN was that interested at the time, and I don't blame them. It was very niche and video game related, and the site also looked a lot worse. It's come a long way to the point where there where I collaborated with som…

[dead]

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#109

Post by EmilyHATFIELD »

dncornholio wrote: post #103
roshankhan28 wrote: post #74

the best anti cheat that i have experience is vangaurd by riot games. I was running a python script in background for web crawling, left it on and guess what? my account got banned. the support says the vangaurd found a script running. i explained them patiently that it was a web crawling script , still no use.

It also sends screenshots of the websites you have open (if it wants to).

do you have a source ?

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#110

Post by bob1029 »

I think the real answer is to sidestep all of the direct, deterministic solutions in favor of statistical ones. I am not 100% certain of this, but I believe some there are some games, like EA's Battlefield series, that utilize a degree of statistical modeling to detect cheaters.

We reliably use statistical process control to automatically calibrate incredibly precise, nanometric-scale machinery for purposes of semiconductor engineering. Surely, with the extreme amount of data available regarding every player's minute inputs in something like a client-server shooter, you could run similar statistical models to detect outliers in performance. With enough samples you can build an extraordinarily damning case.

The only downside is that statistical models will occasionally produce false positives. But, I've personally been "falsely" banned by purely deterministic methods (VAC) for reasons similar to others noted in this thread (i.e. leaving debugging/memory tools running for a separate project while playing a game). So, in practice I feel like statistical models might even provide a better experience around the intent to cheat (i.e. if you aren't effectively causing trouble, we dont care).

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