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

Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

gamingonlinux.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 660 posts

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#241

Post by coretx »

heromal wrote: post #89
baseballdork wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't that be detectable?

Without kernel level anti cheat you can detect (some) other usermode cheats, but not kernel level cheats. With kernel level anticheat, you can detect the vast majority of other kernel level cheats. Vanguard is effective enough that most successful cheaters are using external devices and DMA to bypass the kernel altogether (or they just use Macs because Apple doesn't allow Vanguard). And despite Riot's insistence to t…

Advanced DMA/IOMMU attacks are hard, soft and firmware specific. In order to detect it, you'll have to do a ton of very expensive work all the while you risk destroying the customers soft, firm and hardware. Good luck explaining the judge what you did.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#242

Post by screcth »

0x457 wrote: post #228
screcth wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User space is not the same as kernel space. User space applications can't access hardware or physical memory. They can't bypass permissions enforced by the OS. None of that applies to hardware or kernel drivers.

Where did I say they are the same? We have a kernel-space thing (anti-cheat or gpu driver) and a user-space thing ((a game actually talks to both) that talks to a kernel-space thing.

I understood that you were making an analogy between installing a piece of hardware and its associated kernel driver with installing a game and its associated kernel anticheat.

When you install a hardware device you are trusting the manufacturer with full access to your machine, so installing a driver does not give them any more powers. You have already "unlocked the door".

When you install a game that runs on user space you are not trusting the vendor nearly as much as you are trusting a hardware manufacturer. Installing a kernel anti cheat is granting them a level of trust and access to your machine that they didn't have before.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#243

Post by cmxch »

Levitating wrote: post #229
kulahan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't wait to find out what China hid in Riot's Vanguard rootkit for all their games. It's 100% a conspiracy theory, but nobody can convince me it's perfectly clean, or if it is, that there isn't an easy way to add some power to it quietly.

The vanguard drivers are signed by Microsoft, the procedure for which includes a safety audit by Microsoft. The driver is just what the developers say it is (as with all other anti-cheat). It provides an untempered interface for the userland anti-cheat to use to get info from the kernel. Because modern cheats tend to alter the output of kernel syscalls by running in the kernel themselves. I really don't see why anyon…

It says something about Microsoft when they OK a known harmful bootkit that expects your computer to act like an XBox with a fancy keyboard (but not too fancy), requests invasive changes to UEFI that have broken systems, and have an overall opacity that rivals an Arthur C. Clarke Monolith.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#244

Post by Rohansi »

nicce wrote: post #155
Rohansi wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latency significantly reduces the effectiveness of culling via the server. There will always be a place for client side anti-cheat if games are running on players' computers.

Funnily, for example, using GeForce Now prevents almost all kind of cheats. Maybe the future of the competitive gaming is that you only use remote client for remote server which is hosted by the game company.

Yes, but even some cheats are possible through streaming. Basic things like scripted no-recoil all the way to aimbots based on image recognition. People are even using AI to recognize and highlight players on your screen - and even some built into monitors!

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#245

Post by sunshowers »

supportengineer wrote: post #147

Not a gamer - Is Steam basically a package manager like 'yum' or 'brew', but for games?

Like 10% of Steam is yum/brew. The other 90% is:

* GUI

* managing installations, including things like Proton to run Win32 games on Linux, and Fossilize to precompile shaders

* bandwidth-saving stuff like being able to transfer games locally

* being able to play remotely in a variety of configurations: LAN, WAN, or having a friend connect to your local session ("Remote Play Together")

* pretty good support for mapping any controller you have to any controller inputs a game wants

* cloud saves

* a bunch of community features like forums and broadcasting

* family sharing

* a VR runtime

* marketing for devs (regular sales, algorithmic recommendations etc)

* an API for devs with various services

* the backend infrastructure for all of the above

It's been around for a long time so it's quite feature-rich at this point. Lots of things that generally make sense to have.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#246

Post by Nadya »

Thaxll wrote: post #207
Nadya wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they worked to any acceptable level of efficacy then they could be tolerated. They're only tolerated by people who think they work as well as they claim to work (security theater) but anyone who knows about the performance impacts and/or are tech-savvy enough to understand it is a rootkit and potential exploit (that would fully pwn your device) hates them. Some cheats are getting rather sophisticated now. There's…

Performance impact is overblown, it was proven that the lost of perf is marginal when implemented properly.

Proven by who and what proof? Because Denuvo is the only one outspoken about how it doesn't impact performance despite all evidence to the contrary and they provide no evidence of their own beyond claiming it doesnt. Then saying they'll prove it doesn't and then backing out of proving it.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/irdeto-backtracks-on-plans-...

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#247

Post by orwin »

lomase wrote: post #138
avery17 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hasn't stopped hackers though.

To be fair it stopped hackers for a while. Many people said Valorant did not have cheaters. But nowdays the Valorant community complains about hackers almost as the CS community.

It's because nowadays cheats run on a secondary machine, often a Pi,so rootkits have less impacts.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#248

Post by codebje »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #110
heromal wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that competitive multiplayer games are not critical. Scripting in e.g. league of legends probably doesn't register on 99% of humanities "top 100 most critical things in my life" radar.

That was my point. We forgot we were gaming, probably due to all the money being thrown around.

No-one likes playing with a cheat in Uno, either, and the table stakes for Uno are pretty low.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#249

Post by flessner »

fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #198
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need kernel-level cheats to bypass VAC, nor kernel level anti-cheats to catch cheaters.

>nor kernel level anti-cheats to catch cheaters. Do you have some examples of good anti-cheats that are not kernel-level? Do you have any that are as good as Riot's Vanguard? I'd prefer examples of FPS games since these are the most mechanically skill based compared to other genres that have more strategy, but would like to hear any examples you are thinking of. Lastly, if you say server-side, that may work, but many…

As someone that plays CS2 and Valorant regularly...

Vanguard hasn't been effective for a while now. The cheating situation is a lot worse than CS in my experience, but every discussion gets shutdown because... well... it's Vanguard.

With CS2 I have talked to many players about this and everyone says the same thing: "There's a very noticeable decline in cheaters above 10k Elo."... personally I have pushed beyond 15k and briefly above 20k Elo and the amount of cheaters have steadily declined (although less obvious cheats, eg. wallhack, are probably more common at that level) - for Valorant it has pretty much stayed at a constant amount of "cheatiness" across the ranks.

CS actually has a rich history of features, functions, services?... that aren't strictly anti-cheat...

Overwatch gave players the option to "police" others players replays - this wasn't only against cheating, but also griefing.

Prime? Is it still even a thing? It was great when CSGO went F2P... all the cheaters just annoyed the non-prime players (F2P).

The ominous Trust factor which is probably the single most effective piece in making my personal experience great. But there's no real way to tell?

Also, VacNet - which is running? is AI based? banning players? lowering their trust factor?... with Valve there's no real way to tell most of the time, but it's probably existent in some shape, way or form.

Not to say that CS2 has solved cheating, it's far from it - but neither has Valorant.

Re: Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

#250

Post by sunshowers »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #74
jsheard wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only works on Linux if the developer allows it, because it's not nearly as effective on Linux. Rust (the game not the language) uses EAC but doesn't run on Linux by choice for example. Neither does Fortnite. Apex Legends uses EAC and does run on Linux, and now nearly every public cheat for that game targets the Linux version because it's such a soft target. I don't really like the status quo of installing random k…

> game targets the Linux version because it's such a soft target. I was going to say games on Linux should require secure boot so cheat kernels and modules can't run, but then the kernel could just lie about it being enabled.

Right, provenance is an issue.

I suspect the only way that might balance everyone's interests would be to set up a separate OS installation for competitive games. This could be done via bare-metal dual boot, via a hypervisor, or just by having a completely different computer for playing games on (what I have). At least in that world you still have a lot more freedom than you do on console, such as the ability to mod games that don't need anti-cheat (which is almost all of them).

Post reply on HN