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Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

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Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#151

Post by chainingsolid »

andrewflnr wrote: post #52
Dalewyn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if game streaming will become one way of kicking off cheaters if this arms race gets really bad. All of the code is stored and executed on trusted systems, you would only need to sanitize control inputs which is a significantly easier task.

> you would only need to sanitize control inputs I'm pretty far from the multiplayer game dev scene, but isn't this close to how a lot of multi player sync works anyway? Just* distribute everyone's control inputs and have them all run a deterministic simulation. And then I guess you would run the same input cheat detection on all the honest clients, which are hopefully the majority... Is this impossible or did I just…

Determinism as a networking model is rare now a days(Still used though!) client/server is a better solution most of the time. And having determinism means the cheater could see everything. But having a deterministic sim means you must insert the cheating in the distributed to everyone inputs... So -if- you could detect cheated input reliably this could be useful.. This route probably isn't worth pursing for just cheating deterrence alone though.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#152

Post by j-bos »

neandrake wrote: post #65
j-bos wrote: post #63

Anti cheat software because one needs to play with people one does not trust and so attempts to get good behavior from strangers by force. Should Magnus Carlsen have required Niemman to get a cavity search? When tons of kids have neuralink implants, should they be polygraphed before taking a spelling test? Cheating is not a technical problem, it's a people problem.

I mean, the same goes for all crime being a people problem. The anti-cheat keeps honest people honest as they say.

> I mean, the same goes for all crime being a people problem.

Yes, and technical solutions are usually a bad sign. How nice is the neighborhood that locks pharmacy razors vs the one that doesn't?

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#153

Post by tiagod »

fragmede wrote: post #88
tiagod wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine all Olympic athletes were to start competing with an AR headset on, which added 5ms of lag to their vision. Would it be a problem if they were all forced to use it?

Not sure I understand your point. There are a lots of rules and regulations on what Olympic athletes are allowed to do. What they eat, what they inject, what they wear. All of that is to make the competition as fair as possible and to have a level playing field so as to make for an interesting competition, to draw viewers, which is what the sponsors care about. For people watching esports, they need to believe that t…

My point is that it would change the game into a different one, with a different skill-set, and forcing everyone through the same restriction wouldn't make it any better.

And even if I disregard all this, cloud gaming wouldn't solve the problem, as hardware cheats that don't run on the gaming machine would still be usable.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#154

Post by spartanatreyu »

Iku_Tri wrote: post #147
spartanatreyu wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my experience game engines just suck. How can cheats exist in a server authoritative game engine architecture? But alas, most programmers have apparently no idea what they're doing when it comes to "netcode". This comment screams: I lack understanding and am overconfident because of it. Ignoring games where all state is known to all parties (e.g. chess, racing, etc...), the fact of the matter is that servers are…

Sorry, hate to ask: Got any recommendations I can read? Watch? Listen to? Self teaching myself at the moment and looking for more info on topics like this.

I'd recommend watching some general game networking architecture videos.

Any tutorials with a tool that lets you simulate latency and packet loss will help you a lot.

Starting off with turn based games is going to help you a ton.

After you've got a handle on that it's worth looking into videos that are more specific to what you need, like fps, rts, etc... and the techniques that each kind of game uses. You'll also get an idea of how online cheating works because you'll be able to see what information each machine can read and set.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#155

Post by pynappo »

PrivateButts wrote: post #105
skrebbel wrote: post #91

I’m not much of a gamer, but my kids are growing up and will soon want to play the real stuff. Is there any easy way to see whether a game requires anti-cheat to run? I’d hate to spend top dollar on a game only to find it’ll take over their entire computer and I’ll want to make a hard rule “no games with kernel level anti cheat in this house” or something like that.

Steam sometimes lets you know with a banner in the store page about a required 3rd party software, but there's also https://areweanticheatyet.com/ maintained by Linux gamers. What's frustrating to me is that games will run the hyper invasive kernel level version of an anti cheat on Windows but will allow Linux plays, which has no such level of access. If we're trusting Linux players with no kernel level monitoring, w…

I think it really is just that some cheaters don't wanna install a different OS, and my understanding is that there are still plenty of hacks on Windows so not much reason to change. Overwatch 2 for example has had a free undetected source-released cheat on Windows for months now (according to what I've heard on Reddit).

I believe Valorant and Roblox have had devs/employees state that supporting Linux isn't worth it for the small proportion of the player base vs the increased cheat risk as well, although feel free to take that with a grain of salt

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#156

Post by eddiewithzato »

cam_l wrote: post #96
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #13

A perk of gamimg on Linux is that none of these invasive anti-cheats work. I consider that a plus since I never care enough about a video game to surrender my privacy or my kernel over to it.

I wouldn't say none . I got VACd on Linux the other day. Not cos I was cheating, just blocking VAC from network access. And not because I was blocking VAC deliberately, just blocking arbitrary code running from random /tmp steam binaries. It is a pretty fucked situation that in order to allow anti cheat, you have to abandon securing your machine.

Yea it’s because Valve updates and streams the VAC modules OTA lol. So to them you were essentially blocking VAC

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#157

Post by eddiewithzato »

npteljes wrote: post #116
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #13

A perk of gamimg on Linux is that none of these invasive anti-cheats work. I consider that a plus since I never care enough about a video game to surrender my privacy or my kernel over to it.

Your kernel might be private, but all your files can be accessed by the game, if it's run by the same user, which I imagine is the setup for most gamers. And since games are proprietary and auto-updated, the potential to do damage or compromise privacy is very high. Adding the kernel to the mix basically changes nothing. It's a cliche, but XKCD shows this really succinctly: https://xkcd.com/1200/

Yea, complaining about the Anticheat doesn’t help since the game itself can arbitrarily run any code when you launch it

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#158

Post by DoItToMe81 »

peremptor wrote: post #106

Im not sure if this is somthing we will ever be able to solve to a satisfactory degree with these top down/automated approaches. I have been gaming my whole life and I miss the "old" days of having community run server as being the default. You would go online one day pick a server and play on it in the mode you want (For context: I am talking about Counter Strike:Source). Over time you would get into talking with th…

Modern AAA games are meant to be disposable, with a killswitch for when the next consumable is released. This isn't possible with community servers. They don't want longevity. Cheating is an entirely self-inflicted problem caused by this. Self-policing communities with moderation tools are far more effective.

These companies are so greed driven, that they lobby to make cheating a federal offence and for private police raids and private house searches, instead of making a healthy community based on previous experience. As has, disturbingly, already happened in Australia (https://torrentfreak.com/images/gtaorders-1.pdf)

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#159

Post by npteljes »

j-bos wrote: post #150
npteljes wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this underestimates the problem. Yes it's a people problem, but a game doesn't have the people-means to solve it, it only has technology. >Anti cheat software because one needs to play with people one does not trust and so attempts to get good behavior from strangers by force. Same could be said about laws. Goes to show that we don't have it solved it, at all. Every single system that we have has active bad a…

I see your parallel with laws. My point is that laws force behavior in a society that we are obligated to share, whereas online games are a choice to share with certain people. The level of intrusion applied to protect a game seems over the top. Especially given many ways to enforce laws are often considered over the top, despite protecting more importent matters. If the match includes cheaters, it's a bad match.

>The level of intrusion applied to protect a game seems over the top

I agree on a theoretical level, like, if it's my general purpose computer, then everything that runs on it should also answer to me, not other parties. This applies to anti-cheat, and also to DRM and other concepts like Trusted Computing and Secure Boot even, to a degree.

I don't see how one could prevent cheating, if one allows a software abstraction layer between the game, and the user. If a software is allowed to manipulate another software, then that other software cannot have proof that it's not being manipulated. On one hand, this is the beauty of computing, but on a practical level, this makes cheating in online games very easy and undetectable. So, because I like playing online, I made the compromise that somehow this level of intrusion is okay.

Re: Anti-Cheat Expert: all your pixels are belong to us

#160

Post by korhojoa »

ianhawes wrote: post #84
BearOso wrote: post #7

The screenshot function pointed in the article out will only be able to take screenshots on older versions of Windows with no compositor, i.e. the ones that draw directly to the scan-out framebuffer. That's why he found it's not used anywhere--it's obsolete.

Thats what I was thinking. Some of the higher end EFT cheats I've used were drawing to the screen but were not picked up by any sort of screenshot tools or even streaming on Discord. It would appear that the whole "take a screenshot of the screen" anti-cheat is no longer effective. As a connoisseur of online game hacks, I'm utterly stunned at the level of sophistication that both parties partake in with respect to th…

Why do you cheat? Genuinely asking, as I've stopped playing EFT due to rampant cheating.
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