PCIe DMA says "what anticheat?"
HDMI grabber and USB HID emulation concurs. Anti-Cheat is just sparkling DRM.
Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
121–130 of 197 posts
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#122I 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 semico…
> like EA's Battlefield series, that utilize a degree of statistical modeling to detect cheaters Battlefield started out using PunkBuster, one of the earliest kernel-level anti-cheats. With Battlefield 4, they used FairFight, a statistical server-side solution, alongside PB. With Battlefield 1, they dropped PB, and operated with just FairFight. And now, EA have decided to create their own kernel-level AC, called EA A…
Was FairFight not enough because statistical methods are insufficient, or because their specific approach was flawed?
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#123One 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…
Unfortunately injection based cheating is not the most prevalent form of cheating within titles that do a great job at preventing it such as overwatch. Screen bots are used often outside of any monitored process through hdmi streams and such. They can use game features, sprites, and colors to make aim and trigger bots that seem pretty natural. Additionally the most prevalant and annoying cheaters are the ones that trick games into believing keyboard and mouse is a controller which combines sticky aim features of controller input with the precision of mouse and keyboard controls. On consoles this is a dominant persistent cheat that a larger percentage of gamers use as opposed to the small percentage that inject code.
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who do you think downloads and runs malware? Users.
By the same argument we should prevents the users from running any program at all because it might be malware.
That is indeed what many people want! Look at people defending "app stores" as being for the users' own good, and sometimes everyone else's.
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I assume there are ways to prevent that (or make it extremely difficult at least)? E.g. look at denuvo, nobody has been able to "open a hex editor" and disable denuvo.
> nobody has been able to "open a hex editor" and disable denuvo. In fact, three people have been able to do so, that's why denuvo games do get cracked.
Not the recent denuvo versions, and not in the past ~1 year.
That's not even the point though, I am not saying it is literally impossible to circumvent this, but as long as it is hard enough that it is not financially reasonable for the cheat makers, that's good enough.
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#126What 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…
I disagree with the onclient kernel stuff. Just like with any website, any checking MUST be server side. Kernel stuff not only makes clients inherently less secure and stable, but also for cheat coders it's only a matter of finding vulnerable driver they can use to avoid being caught.
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#127What 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…
>This is a big misunderstanding, and I feel like those more technically inclined should understand that anti-cheat is a "defense-in-depth" type of approach. Where it is just one of many lines of defense. Some anti-cheats are pretty useless, and don't do much, but some actually do try and protect the game you're playing.
As a serious player of many multiplayer games I disagree. All it takes is one cheat to circumvent the protections and soon enough every cheater will use that circumvention.
Meanwhile, I, the legitimate player suffer from degraded performance, disconnections (looking at you Amazon Games - you've not been able to fix your (most likely) Easy Anticheat disconnection issue in 2 years!), or outright inability to play.
Perhaps the cheating situation would be worse without anticheats, but considering how rampant it seems to be in fast-paced or grindy games I play, I kind of doubt it.
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason multiplayer servers implicitly trust clients is because it's a cheaper and proven (less risk) solution. The traditional anti-cheat can be just slapped after the game is developed in most games. If the game is very successful then you can just update the game with extra paid protections provided by the anti-cheat tool. The alternative is local game engine that works with a partial game state which is a chal…
As someone working in AAA game development, I come across comments like these often, and they never fail to get under my skin. It’s like watching that infamous "Two idiots, one keyboard" scene from CSI—full of confidence, but completely detached from reality. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but it’s tough to tackle this kind of misconception because it’s stated with such certainty that others, who also might not know an…
>It’s just the best trade-off (for all parties, especially gamers)
I fail to see how pimping out my PC to code that no one can verify is a good deal. The takeaway is, have a separate hardware to play games on and don't let it touch anything private?
I agree with the rest of the comment though.
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#129In the case of FPS, it is gone: with AI cheats which are morphing average/bad players into god like/very good players, that without being on the player system, (external, and input device man-in-the-middle or custom/modified input devices), FPS games implementing anti-cheats are doing so more to please microsoft than anything else: too be sure it won't run on linux based OSes (like "secure" boot in order to sabotage easy installation of "free" alternative OSes).
That said, you "may" have a chance at detecting it using game related metrics on server side. Because an AI will very probably betray itself at some point, "AI"s are usually imperfect like human.
Elephant in room, the more you put big brother in your system, the less you will be able to run really free operating systems. So long for your digital freedom.
Look at the abominations which are video game consoles.
It is obcene to have to pay a lot of money for completely locked/digital jail devices. It should be illegal, period. They should be leased for cheap.
Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?
#130the 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.
lol I had something similar but instead of a crawler, I had WinDBG run a BSOD dump file and the game automatically closed. I forgot the game was running in the background while I trying to figure out what was crashing my system. It was a random network monitoring driver (after removing it) problem solved. But I ended up getting shadow banned. After 14 days. My account reverted back to normal. My guess, the game triggered a fail safe and closed to avoid any injection or step process read. But the fact that I was running a debugger to fix problems, it just tells me that some of these anti cheats are trash. It still puzzles me how they do not implement daily offset reset randomizer with encryption + decryption binded to the device. Anyone want to partner up and start an anti cheat service solution let me know. =)