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Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

engineering.riotgames.com

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Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#171

Post by infogulch »

drdaeman wrote: post #156
infogulch wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> emulator to execute your machine code I think you missed a part. Namely that "It is allowed to read from anywhere". If it can't write anywhere but the sandbox, that just means it can't modify the game dynamically, just read its state. Which is plenty to verify whether the client has been hacked anywhere. You can read spans of .text to check whether code has been modified, you can read heap locations to check whethe…

A sandbox can be a virtual machine, for all practical purposes indistinguishable from any "normal" computers ordinary players use. Of course this will lead to the never ending Ouroboros of more sophisticated detectors and more sophisticated virtualization, ad infinitum. I've heard there are cheats that use hypervisors to stand above the operating systems and avoid kernel-level anti-cheats. I wouldn't be too surprised…

I never claimed that this would be perfect. All security, especially the kind we're talking about here and the kind mentioned in the fine article is about the relative effort that the developer and cheater has to do to create the obsfucation and work around it, respectively. Making debugging harder doesn't make debugging impossible, it makes it more difficult and take more time. Adding random cheat checks on every rebuild doesn't make it impossible to find and remove them, just takes more effort and time. I.e. how much time investment do the developers have to put into making the workaround vs how much effort it takes the cheater.

I'm just saying this could be a relatively low effort on the part of the developers to create and a relatively huge effort on the part of cheaters to work around.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#173

Post by AmericanChopper »

phoe-krk wrote: post #108
shmerl wrote: post #95

Does it hinder Linux gamers who are using Wine? A lot of such anti-cheats can't figure out when Wine is used and ban Linux users. Some also ban custom D3D implementations like DXVK even if they are really correctly implementing the API.

Yes - it hit the news that LoL will no longer work on Wine or virtual machines because of these anti-cheat measures.

They rolled that back rather quickly.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#174

Post by drdaeman »

bitexploder wrote: post #168
drdaeman wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sandbox can be a virtual machine, for all practical purposes indistinguishable from any "normal" computers ordinary players use. Of course this will lead to the never ending Ouroboros of more sophisticated detectors and more sophisticated virtualization, ad infinitum. I've heard there are cheats that use hypervisors to stand above the operating systems and avoid kernel-level anti-cheats. I wouldn't be too surprised…

Hah. Are you me? That is what I always call the cat and mouse of cheat / anti cheat. (An Ouroboros) :-D

I've just read your comment above and then quoted you without the proper credit ;) Liked the naming.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#175

Post by invalidOrTaken »

vkou wrote: post #155
maerF0x0 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many responses are saying the same thing, so I'm going to respond to you ... > It's not chess. I agree it's not chess, and chess often has a time component to it. The realtime nature of a game doesnt mean you should have to be able to "move" in realtime, IMO it would be superior if it tracked more closely to your ability to react, intellectually, in realtime. That is, real time thought more than realtime motion. Ergo…

With enough mechanical aides, the game balance breaks. For example, SC2 has a very cheap unit called the roach. When burrowed, it can't attack, but regenerates health incredibly quickly. It's trivial to write a cheat that will, whenever one of your roaches starts taking damage, causes it to burrow, and whenever it stops taking damage, unburrow. The unit is balanced around human control - no human can, with perfect ac…

>With such a cheat, roaches punch way above their weight, completely breaking the rock-paper-scissors balance of the game.

Against marines, sure. But against siege tanks/disruptors?

Sirlin's spiel about there being more counters than people think (http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub) seems applicable here.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#176

Post by munchbunny »

ipython wrote: post #157
johnmg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair context: I make cheats/utilities this exact game being talked about in this article, so perhaps my opinion on the subject is biased or even invalid. I partially disagree about the transparency of this article, while they do explain most of their approach to anti-cheat (and that is pretty cool for them to do), they seem to leave out any mention of anything that could be controversial. It suppose that it does make…

Wouldn't that run afoul of GDPR?

Not necessarily. GDPR isn't a blanket ban on collecting/using this info without consent, it's a policy that consent is required for non-essential collection/usage. You could argue that anti-cheat is essential for an online multiplayer game like this.

I think it's sketchy to collect this much info, but I don't think it's explicitly illegal.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#178

Post by lucb1e »

ryanlol wrote: post #161
ipython wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that run afoul of GDPR?

The anticheat team at a videogame company might not know/care about this. This has definitely been the case with past European data privacy regulations.

Or it might be deemed reasonable. E.g. you may not film public road in the Netherlands because of privacy, but you may film the patch that your car stands on it if there have been car fires in your neighbourhood in the past month and you are concerned about your car.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#179

Post by gibybo »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #101

IMO games should encourage ergonomic aids. Why allow the UI to be a limiting factor to how you want to play? For example people used to talk about APM in SC2 as a sort of measure of how good someone is. Why should that be? It's a strategy game. Imagine if you could express your ideas effectively into actual game actions?

Games aren't really about getting you to solve a problem, they are about making something fun. Making something fun is a lot easier when you control the UI completely. Letting the users build their own UI places a lot of constraints on what you can build in the game and still be fun.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#180

Post by m-p-3 »

withinrafael wrote: post #153

So I'm not seeing anything particularly novel here. In fact, I think most AAA titles do most if not all of these things today. It really just boils down to understanding your title's threat model and mitigating the threats. I think the article missed an opportunity to talk about false positive rates, the workflow for users to get unbanned due to false positives (usually a very nasty process), performance, platform su…

> usually a very nasty process

especially with how opaque the whole flagging is.

I understand why they do it and a game environment is not a democracy or a court of law, but it's hard to defend yourself when you do not have access to the evidences.

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