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Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

areweanticheatyet.com

151–160 of 197 posts

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#151
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 prog…

> The handle must have PROCESS_VM_READ access to the process.

While the process still stays in user space, that's significantly different than "just being a user space program"

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#152
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what's naive is to assume that statistical detection methods haven't been investigated at length by the anti-cheat companies. When a complete newcomer comes to a field and sees professionals not doing a simple thing, the right question isn't "why don't you just do this, duh", but "I thought this would work, why doesn't it?".

Newcomers definitely make naive assumptions, Chesterton's fence etc. I'm not a newcomer though, I've worked on both cheats and anti-cheats going back more than two decades. I know how the sausage is made and it's not pretty. The anti-cheat companies you talk about mostly sell a mass produced product that works very similarly to anti-virus software. Games embed the anti-cheat module and its cheat definitions get updat…

Ah, well, I defer to your industry knowledge, in that case. I'm not very knowledgeable on this sector.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#153
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another offender is Ubisoft, or more specifically the R6 Siege team. Battleye works perfectly fine on Linux - in fact, other Ubisoft teams have enabled Battleye-Linux support for their games (ex: For Honor) - but for whatever reason, the Siege team refuses to do so, even though it's one of the most upvoted issues on the bug tracker [1]. [1] https://r6fix.ubi.com/projects/RAINBOW6-SIEGE-LIVE/issues/LI...

Doesn't the Battleye build in Linux makes it easier for cheaters to cheat on Linux vs. the windows one ? Just trying to understand their reasoning

BattlEye is generally broken even on windows (though it happens that it is actually working as intended right now). Cheaters generally use windows, and switching to Linux will only be done when the windows anticheat is considerably harder to break, and with proton/wine, you even get to run the same version on both.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#154

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.

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 trigg…

Rainbow 6 siege has "individual" builds (they really have 8 different builds, each tied to 1/8 accounts).

Apparently it's not really effective at all.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#155
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…

Putting a government monitored streaming video camera in every bedroom and bathroom in the country to detect sexual assault would also be "defense in depth". But it would be a terrible thing to do, both because it's easily evaded (do your rape someplace else) and because of the intrusion. Any kind of defense in depth argument has to consider how easily bypassed the defense is and the cost it comes at.

Believe it or not, most people don't play video games against strangers. Anti-cheat is not of any value to them. Even for people who do play video games against strangers even uncompromised anti-cheat doesn't stop many forms of cheating like macro-mouses. Especially now with all the success being shown at machine learning playing video games with nothing more than a video feed and the button inputs, the amount that anti-cheat can help is clearly quite bounded and getting worse over time.

And the cost? Anti-cheat comes at the cost of general purpose computing, at the cost of being able to control the computers with which you trust your most intimate secrets. It's a civil liberties nightmare, or at least a per-requisite technology for many such nightmares. Opposition to anti-cheat is opposition to RMS's Right to read dystopia (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html).

I don't think it's too far a leap that saying that anti-cheat or DRM technology that comes at the expense of the availability of general purpose computing is more of a problem for human rights than the farcical bedroom cameras I started with.

So when you advocate anti-cheating technology that locks users out of controlling their own computers, you're favoring an at-best incremental improvement which can still be evaded for a narrow application that most people don't care about... and this comes at the expense of imperiling the human rights of others.

Like with many things there is an asymmetry to the costs: Anti-cheat and DRM substantially fail if even a moderate amount of dedicated people still have a way to cheat. Yet the damage to people's freedom from the loss of general purpose computing is still substantial even when the lockdowns can be evaded.

If anti-cheat came at no meaningful cost the fact that it could be evaded wouldn't be a meaningful argument against it. But it's expensive to develop, intrusive, disruptive, and the more successful it is the more effective it'll be at being abused to deny people control of their computers in anti-social ways.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#156
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the user controls their own machine, so they can open a hex editor and turn your option off.

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.

Denuvo has been disabled many times; however, the amount of work required to modify all the generated injection points is tedious—it's a LOT of work. It seems that fewer and fewer people are willing to spend weeks or months of their lives cracking a single game.

Anti-cheat systems, on the other hand, are entirely different. If you only need to modify one variable in the game, it's much easier because, in most cases, that variable is frequently used. This means you can't add too much overhead to its use, and after all, it's just one variable.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

do you have a source ?

I'm not saying it is, I'm saying it could, because this is one of the most intrusive anti-cheats on the market. It can do and see basically anything on your computer.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how's that gonna help you when cheaters can use an HDMI grabber and USB HID emulation? Lol

I imagine that having to buy special hardware means fewer people will do it, the types of dongles used for this are likely detectable in some way by kernel-level anticheat, and computer vision based cheats probably work better when you can inject contrasting color textures into the game. I don’t think any system will stop someone truly dedicated, but the general idea is that each thing that adds a little more frictio…

People buy all kinds of stuff online, why not this device? Unless the game uses HDCP the hdmi rip is not possible to detect. And the usb controller could even forward the properties of the connected device. These devices exist as we speak

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#159
post #145

If Apex Legends, CS, and Valorant has taught me anything, it's that anti cheat does not work. Once you start approaching a pro level, cheating becomes rampant. The cheaters don't make them, they buy them. It really needs a multi factor solution. The technical solution is not enough. Trying to buy cheats should be like trying to buy chemical precursors to illicit drugs. There should be a strong social stigma. Most che…

> Trying to buy cheats should be like trying to buy chemical precursors to illicit drugs.

oh my. Seeing your posts makes me sincerely want to lobby to ban video games at least if adding additional liabilities to distributing software or computing devices were actually a direction that the games industry was promoting.

We need to stop letting stupid entertainment companies trample our rights to narrowmindedly maximize their profits.

Re: Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?

#160
I understand that Anti-Cheat keeps honest people honest. Which, sure if it's your purely-for-gaming box, ok, maybe ok.

It's just that I use my machine for more stuff than gaming; and for anything else I'd really rather not have it on there at the same time.

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