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Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

engineering.riotgames.com

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Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#311

Post by IntelMiner »

rcoveson wrote: post #126
larrik wrote: post #89

Unfortunately, their latest anti-cheat measures broke the ability to play on Wine. Guess no LoL for me anymore.

They broke GPU passthrough setups as well at first. There was some community backlash and they rolled that back, and I believe they also mentioned they intended to work with the wine people on a solution for that as well.

"they also mentioned they intended to work with the wine people on a solution for that as well"

Be nicer if they'd just put the damn thing on Linux. They're already on Windows and Mac after all

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#313

Post by wingerlang »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #307
exgamedev wrote: post #212

Back when I worked in games we would detect cheaters and then shadow ban. Quarantine them by only matching them into games with other cheaters. You may still have to ban them from certain elements of your game, like player economies (auction house, etc). But the more legitimate their experience looks the better. The idea is that instead of fully banning them and triggering the next iteration of the arms race, you tra…

This approach sounds incredibly smart. Hope you can share more details about it, or even a fun story or two.

There's a youtuber who focuses on CSGO that recently made a video where he interviews a cheater, they touch on the "cheater vs cheater community" in the video as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gniSF1M9g_o

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#314

Post by industriousthou »

13years wrote: post #252
m3rc wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... sure but they're also only willing to interact with the game when they're making the experience bad for everyone else.

Certainly not all cheaters have the same interests. Some are simply curious experimenters, others are trolling, others want to make videos doing the impossible etc. I wish there was another path out of this mess than the current arms race. It would be interesting what effect would result in providing a sandbox mode where cheating were allowed to see if it would reduce cheating in general population.

I've thought a little about building cheating detection into the mechanics and lore of maybe an MMORPG by treating it like a forbidden dark art.

If a player is flagged for cheating, they could take on an "aura" in the game. Maybe different types of auras for different types of cheating or for the types of events that took place around the cheating. It could grow stronger with more flags or fade with time. Fine-grained detection of auras could be a sought-after perception skill.

The in-game community could decide how they want to treat different types of cheaters. You could see interesting things like self-segregation or vigilante organizations.

You still have to intervene a lot to block gold farming bots or whatever, but I think you can keep the vanilla players and most cheaters happy.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#315

Post by benswieskowski »

exgamedev wrote: post #212

Back when I worked in games we would detect cheaters and then shadow ban. Quarantine them by only matching them into games with other cheaters. You may still have to ban them from certain elements of your game, like player economies (auction house, etc). But the more legitimate their experience looks the better. The idea is that instead of fully banning them and triggering the next iteration of the arms race, you tra…

Did you consider the possibility of false positives? Even the most modern and well considered justice system runs into this issue. Or is this not possible when detecting video game cheaters?

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#316

Post by ehnto »

s_m_t wrote: post #254
m3rc wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... sure but they're also only willing to interact with the game when they're making the experience bad for everyone else.

I don't think it is really the cheaters that degrade the experience, it is the knowledge (right or wrong) that cheaters exist that reduces trust that makes for not fun experiences. I've played online games for many thousands of hours over the past two decades and I can count the number of times I encountered a blatant cheater on my hands. Every time it actually happened people had a good laugh about it and either hop…

What games do you play? Because it's at least once a play session for me. Perhaps we are playing different games or different regions have more cheaters than others.

I have also often wondered if cheaters choose other regions than their own to exploit in, hence why little ol' Australia gets so many of them.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#317

Post by Teknoman117 »

I have mixed feelings about anti-cheat, especially in the last few years. A lot of them are getting rather intrusive. Take Player Unknown's Battlegrounds for instance, which uses BattlEye. It actually injects a kernel mode driver into Windows that spies on whatever else your system is doing and exfiltrates unknown data in the name of "guaranteeing a fair game experience." I didn't even realize that this is what it was doing until my system crashed one day and the cause was some .sys file in PUBG.

It'll also randomly kick you from games for having various programs installed or running. Programs such as VMware. You have to disable all VMware services or PUBG will kick you randomly for using "unauthorized applications." God forbid you have any VMs running, that might amount to a ban (seriously).

Worse still is that when you take your complaints to their social media, or in anyway speak ill of it, you get hordes of fanboys saying that you shouldn't install anything other than games on your PC or you're a dirty cheater. "Oh you want to do things _other_ than gaming on your PC? You should buy another PC then."

Don't even get me started about trying to run games in a virtual machine w/ GPU passthrough. The communities will tear you a new one telling you to do things "normally" and by attempting to use anything other than the "normal" setup makes you a cheater. Just google anything like "steam vac kvm" or "battleye kvm" and you'll get hordes of people claiming they heard some guy say virtualization is the future of game cheating therefore VMs are cheating tools and should be banned.

Seriously, if I could get a refund for every game that uses BattlEye, I would try.

/rant

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#318

Post by Teknoman117 »

EvangelicalPig wrote: post #206
rcoveson wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They broke GPU passthrough setups as well at first. There was some community backlash and they rolled that back, and I believe they also mentioned they intended to work with the wine people on a solution for that as well.

How did it break GPU passthrough? Then again I heard recent versions of VAC detect running under a KVM hypervisor and kick you out of CS:GO servers.

That's unfortunate to hear that VAC looks for KVM. I was planning on moving my gaming partition to just a VM and using GPU passthrough. It's how I have my work PC setup, figured I'd replicate it at home.

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#319

Post by tptacek »

crsv wrote: post #3

This is a great technical breakdown of some modern high level approaches to common cheats. I think this the most transparent approach (even though the author admits leaving some detail out) to modern anti-cheat for massive multiplayer games. Good on riot for having an open dialogue about this. I don't think you'd ever see someone like Valve going a transparent route with something like this. (Not making a judgement o…

It's a good article but I'd hesitate to call this "modern"; this is circa-2006 AAA title security. Serious content protection is significantly more sophisticated than this.

(I'm not an expert but I've done some anti-cheating pentests before, and have seen literally all these primitives deployed on old titles).

Re: Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat

#320

Post by ehsankia »

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…

If you wanna something more novel, look at this talk from Valve [0] on how they are integrating Deep Learning into their CS:GO cheater detection system (confusingly called Overwatch). It's not used to ban users, but rather to bring suspicious plays into their existing user-reviewed moderation system.

In general, this type of human/AI side-by-side feedback loop seems to be very successful, all the way from games to moderating content on the web.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc

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