Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Message About Vanguard From Our Security and Privacy Teams

riotgames.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 103 posts

Re: A Message About Vanguard From Our Security and Privacy Teams

#21

Post by ds »

lol768 wrote: post #10
ds wrote: post #7

The inherent issue with anti cheats as compared to anti-virus software is user intention. A user who installs a anti virus program wants that program to do its job and find bad actors. The virus on the other hand is completely unwanted by both the user and the software- Its existence is threatened by all fronts. However, a anti-cheat lives in a extremely adversarial environment. The cheater (and the cheat) wants the…

> Years and years ago, I developed with a friend of mine a completely undetectable cheat for all games on the HL2 platform. > It involved a second computer, which man-in-the-middled all network data to the client computer. Out of interest, was there no transport level encryption to deal with here? Or did you need to do something special to capture keys on the client?

That heavy lifting wasnt done by myself so I unfortunately dont have a answer for you. This was around a decade ago however, so I would not be surprised if the traffic was unencrypted.

Re: A Message About Vanguard From Our Security and Privacy Teams

#22

Post by Kaveren »

lidHanteyk wrote: post #2

Folks should build alternative clients for Riot's games. Riot has demonstrated that they should not be trusted to write clients.

Doing something like this would probably be illegal if you want to connect to Valorant servers or distribute it, would be easy for Riot to detect and ban users of, and if it worked well it would be a haven for cheaters to ruin Riot games from.

Re: A Message About Vanguard From Our Security and Privacy Teams

#23

Post by mormegil »

dharmab wrote: post #17
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless you're running a dedicated PC for gaming That's the approach I've been taking for a long time now. If you don't, you will always a) have your fun ruined by trying to be security conscious b) in the end, most likely give in and allow things you really shouldn't allow on a trusted machine because otherwise you can't achieve your task (getting a game to run). So I have a game box, try to make sure that nothing…

My next gaming PC will run a Linux hypervisors and use PCI passthru to run Windows as a full-performance guest. Then if I need to use a web browser, I can switch to a Linux guest without interrupting the game.

This was my exact plan for my (current) computer a few years ago. But after learning about all the real-world complications I became lazy and abandoned the idea. Is this in a realm of "easily achievable out-of-the-box on a standard Linux installation" now?

Re: A Message About Vanguard From Our Security and Privacy Teams

#24

Post by SpaceManNabs »

houzi wrote: post #16
SpaceManNabs wrote: post #9

I skimmed, but it seems none of this addressed why the service (edit) runs at boot-time? Also, expecting a service to not not look at your data if they have access is not security. If Valve can mitigate hacking in CSGO without such an intrusive service, I am sure Riot can. I, myself, did a very, very, very poor job with an autoencoder to detect anomalous matches in Dota and caught a large amount of players abusing th…

Hackers in standard CSGO games are rampant from what I understand. Serious players pay extra to queue up in a dedicated service for high tickrate servers and anti-cheats which I believe are rootkits as well.. not sure about any of this though.

rampant years ago. It took a long time to get where it is now. There are still cheaters here and there, but that is to be expected, and relatively rare in my experience.

Re: A Message About Vanguard From Our Security and Privacy Teams

#25

Post by m463 »

smoyer wrote: post #3

Explaining your rationale doesn't change the fact that gamers (many unwittingly) are potentially giving the keys to their computer kingdom to Riot. This behavior on a console would be completely acceptable but unless you're running a dedicated PC for gaming, I wouldn't install this software. As a thought experiment, I wonder what happens when the FISA court orders Riot to install a modified version on a suspected ter…

> Vanguard does not collect or process any personal information beyond what the current League of Legends anti-cheat solution does.

They are tiptoeing quite carefully there.

I wonder if a lot of "collect or process" can be blocked by users, but with a kernel module actually prevents opt-out attempts and identifies everyone.

Re: A Message About Vanguard From Our Security and Privacy Teams

#26

Post by devit »

smoyer wrote: post #3

Explaining your rationale doesn't change the fact that gamers (many unwittingly) are potentially giving the keys to their computer kingdom to Riot. This behavior on a console would be completely acceptable but unless you're running a dedicated PC for gaming, I wouldn't install this software. As a thought experiment, I wonder what happens when the FISA court orders Riot to install a modified version on a suspected ter…

All software that you install on the main desktop operating systems is given the "keys to their computer kingdom": there is no privilege separation or sandboxing, except for the "user vs root" division, which can be trivially bypassed in countless ways (and anyway, most installers require root privileges).

And yes, obviously you need to have a dedicated gaming PC and certainly not install any games or any software that isn't strictly necessary on the systems/VMs with important data.

Re: A Message About Vanguard From Our Security and Privacy Teams

#27

Post by Kaveren »

ds wrote: post #18
_kxbd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future of anti-cheat is machine learning specific to the game. CS:GO already does this, where it used the Overwatch community review program to train it, and it can now automatically ban some cheaters. I don't think it's a viable model because players are willing to do it for free, as CS:GO's Overwatch shows.

Valve also put a significant amount of work into this system. Asking every game developer to build that system for their game seems like alot to ask- Especially when they can just drop in a few lines of code // third party software package and have cheating 'handled'. 'Not invented here' is a blessing and a curse.

Public relations for a startup like this would be hard to manage. I can already see the front page Reddit post with 4,000 upvotes on the game's subreddit asking why they lost $400 worth of items because one of the outsourced employees being paid $3/hour illegitimately banned them. Easy target to blame a company like this.

Cheater effort and quantity scales roughly with game revenue and popularity. So the first tier of games, the most popular and long-term ones, like League of Legends, CS:GO, Overwatch, maybe Valorant, Apex Legends, Fortnite, can afford machine learning. The next tier down can afford to implement community review programs, where players earn in-game rewards and the satisfaction of improving game experience.

Re: A Message About Vanguard From Our Security and Privacy Teams

#28

Post by prussian »

dharmab wrote: post #17
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless you're running a dedicated PC for gaming That's the approach I've been taking for a long time now. If you don't, you will always a) have your fun ruined by trying to be security conscious b) in the end, most likely give in and allow things you really shouldn't allow on a trusted machine because otherwise you can't achieve your task (getting a game to run). So I have a game box, try to make sure that nothing…

My next gaming PC will run a Linux hypervisors and use PCI passthru to run Windows as a full-performance guest. Then if I need to use a web browser, I can switch to a Linux guest without interrupting the game.

Honestly, you're just risking getting banned then; some games already ban wine users and a hypervisoris basically the peak of hiding direct memory access so I imagine anticheat engines look for them.

Also, I did this around 3-4 years ago. It works, but once you have it set up its basically the same as if you had two computers effectively on your desk with a kvm switch in software. It also has a tendency to be unstable as all sin and some iommu isolated hardware may misbehave when assigned to a virtual machine.

Re: A Message About Vanguard From Our Security and Privacy Teams

#29

Post by haunter »

DavidVoid wrote: post #13
ds wrote: post #7

The inherent issue with anti cheats as compared to anti-virus software is user intention. A user who installs a anti virus program wants that program to do its job and find bad actors. The virus on the other hand is completely unwanted by both the user and the software- Its existence is threatened by all fronts. However, a anti-cheat lives in a extremely adversarial environment. The cheater (and the cheat) wants the…

To my knowledge radar cheaters are now dealt with by not sending information about enemy positions if they are behind walls. It's not a perfect solution ofc but it seems like it works reasonably well.

The current one in Valorant is simple wallhack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATkpqYmWt8k&feature=youtu.be

Re: A Message About Vanguard From Our Security and Privacy Teams

#30

Post by SpaceManNabs »

Kaveren wrote: post #15
SpaceManNabs wrote: post #9

I skimmed, but it seems none of this addressed why the service (edit) runs at boot-time? Also, expecting a service to not not look at your data if they have access is not security. If Valve can mitigate hacking in CSGO without such an intrusive service, I am sure Riot can. I, myself, did a very, very, very poor job with an autoencoder to detect anomalous matches in Dota and caught a large amount of players abusing th…

I think a Riot employee stated that cheaters would try to start cheats before the anticheat starts, so the anticheat running at all times is trying to prevent this. CS:GO has a lot more hackers than games with more intrusive anticheats like Overwatch in my experience. Only solution is an invasive anticheat, machine learning, and trust factor systems.

I have not seen anything conclusive on CSGO having more trusted players playing with cheaters than overwatch. My anecdotal evidence for both games also goes along with this.
Post reply on HN