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Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

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Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#111

Post by jokoon »

mdswanson wrote: post #57

A 2-year legal battle with Activision to overturn a false permanent ban. Activision showed up with zero evidence of cheating and lost: https://antiblizzard.win/2025/01/18/my-two-year-fight-agains...

Interesting article

Maybe he was banned because as a developer, he had development tools installed on his machine, which increased the odds of him being labeled as a potential cheater.

Sometimes I even wonder if other hackers could not hack the machine or other players, to install a software that triggers anti-cheat system: it becomes then difficult to lift the ban.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#114

Post by MisterTea »

mdswanson wrote: post #57

A 2-year legal battle with Activision to overturn a false permanent ban. Activision showed up with zero evidence of cheating and lost: https://antiblizzard.win/2025/01/18/my-two-year-fight-agains...

I wonder how these anti-cheat tools are impacted by flatpak and its partial sandboxing. Otherwise they sound quite invasive.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#115

Post by jezzamon »

jokoon wrote: post #109

Wouldn't it be possible or relevant to periodically, electronically sign the game state, to prevent cheating? Or with some proof of work? I am starting to think that cheat are just too hard to fight against, I am making a small, cheap online FPS, and I would let users trust each other instead, and hunt cheaters themselves, or maybe use AI like valve is doing. I would not bother have a anti cheat software. Also player…

At a high level, you can just simulate the game without cheats, sign that, and then do the cheats separately.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#116

Post by jagrsw »

I experienced the trust factor (banning, w/o banning officially) issues on my Linux CS:GO account in 2021, dropping to yellow and then red. This made it difficult to find teammates, as I was constantly matched with cheaters.

I discovered I wasn't alone, as many other Linux users with Radeon GPUs and 16GB+ VRAM were experiencing similar problems. We created a GitHub issue to track the problem and try to find a solution: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/csgo-osx-linux/issues/2630

After some investigation, we found that Valve was punishing Linux users with certain hardware configurations (radeon cards with >=16GB of VRAM, which were quite new at this time).

Eventually, after a user reached out to gaben directly, the issue was fixed: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/csgo-osx-linux/issues/2630#...

I suspect this was because Valve was preparing to launch the Steam Deck, and gaben wanted to ensure that Linux users had better experience with the device (just a guess).

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#117

Post by RHSeeger »

jokoon wrote: post #110
alkonaut wrote: post #102

Cheating is ultimately a human problem. You can have some safeguards and heuristics like the ones the article describe, to weed out 90% the most blatant cheaters, so I think anticheats like these are fundamentally a good thing. But the anti-cheat can and should err on the safe side because ultimately it should be the players and admins themselves that sort this out. Online multiplayer games must (yes must ) take plac…

I agree for the most part, there are other ways, like a phone number, manual verification with a photo, require players to play 10hr before they can play competitive, have a recommendation from other players, etc, or even a pay-once 5 dollars game pass on top of all those things. Although I recommend you to watch the valve presentation of AI anti cheat if you did not already. Their work is quite interesting, and they…

> they claim they catch 99% of cheaters

But that's easy. The tricky part is catching the cheaters _without_ also catching non-cheaters.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#118

Post by 15155 »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #47
monkburger wrote: post #43

As long as you can read and write to memory, you'll never stop cheating in multiplayer games.

Sure, and that's why there's more and more "trusted" hardware to try and get computers to a place where their users cannot read and write to or from their own memory.

Good luck ensuring every PCIe device with DMA access is "trusted."

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#119

Post by giantg2 »

You don't even need to cheat at COD. They are so buggy they'll do it for you. They'll load a gun in place of your knife in ranked. They clearly have a faulty case/if-else statement in the ranked gun loadout checker to allow that and also to default to XM4 if the gun shown in the load out picker isn't allowed.

It's probably the only game I know of where the ranked version is more broken than the casual version...

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#120

Post by 15155 »

brettermeier wrote: post #94
rustcleaner wrote: post #80

Needs to be a law against the taking away of product functionality after the sale, even if it's contractual/EULA. A ban should never take the game away from the owner, and in cases where it does then they need to be refunded (treble damages on top of license, lawyer, and court fees if it takes a judgment to induce the refund). Getting banned on Steam, say, in the sense that all of one's purchases are invalidated shou…

I don't mind cheaters getting their asses kicked. Let them lose real money. If you accidentally get banned, that's a different story though. And it's just a game that's not playable anymore, not the whole Steam account, isn't it?

The entire Steam account is tainted: that's the issue.

Some random commercial third party can make an accusation and damage the value of thousands of games on a lark.

Meanwhile, any determined cheater just bought another copy of the game on an account dedicated solely to that task. This person suffers no extended consequence.

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