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We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

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Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#331

Post by the_clarence »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #5

Server side only anti-cheat is one of the problem domains that I'd really love to work on at some point in my career. This is the type of adversarial arms race that just seems really fun to think long and hard about.

It also significantly improves people's lives. Entire online games are reduced to no man's lands due to cheaters. I remember buying a number of battlefield games a couple years ago and a number of them were unplayable due to cheaters speedhacking and aimboting. I remember thinking "this is easy to detect on the server side, why arent they doing anything".

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#332

Post by doublerabbit »

Glide wrote: post #282
animal531 wrote: post #274

Players from big countries often miss out on the sense of community that exist in smaller ones. When there are only 3-4 servers worth of people playing a game every day you quickly come to know them all, which really adds to the banter and sense of enjoyment.

If you’re old enough you remember favoriting servers in Gamespy. You’d end up on the same servers depending on who is there and mainly how good your connection was.

I didn't use Gamespy but did use "The All Seeing Eye"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_All-Seeing_Eye which was sold to yahoo.

Yahoo was a powerhouse back in the day and one that google offered to sell to. The world would be so different if it had.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#333

Post by jerf »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #63
oneplane wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the sophistication is not really in the technical breaking of the game or protocol anymore, figuring out if something is plausible might yield detections that you cannot "cheat" because it no longer matters if your cursor clicked on a head at the right time or not, it matters if your posture/reputation/experience makes your behaviour plausible. Cheating and anti-cheat used to rely a lot on the pure technical…

It's hard to balance around those sorts of things. For example, imagine a cheat that gives the player additional info about where enemies are and their state (ie: health). Even if they are of totally normal skill level in terms of movement and aim, that info will allow them to be substantially better than others. How are you going to detect that, and differentiate it from players who simply have a great sense of map…

We're really used to thinking of cheaters as being effectively gods within their games, and that playing with them is no fun whatsoever.

But if the anti-cheat is able to advance to the point that a cheater can merely rise up the ranks by 10%, then, if you think about it... in a lot of ways the problem is solved. When I'm playing in a match, and one of the players is in the 80th percentile by their own merits, and another is "naturally" a 60th percentile player but is cheating their way up to an 80th percentile player somehow... and if they can't see through walls or insta-headshot across the map or do anything other blatently violating the rules, they just play a little better... what's the actual difference?

There is some. It's not zero. If you can't get those cheaters under control in tournament play the situation will normalize to everyone using a cheat just to keep up in a Red Queen's race, and that's still bad for other reasons.

But it isn't the same impact as playing with Sir Snipes-A-Lot who headshots you through three walls the instant your spawn invulnerability wears off, either.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#334

Post by amonon »

johnisgood wrote: post #124
snarfy wrote: post #25

For UT2004, you can ban by player GUID (a hash of the CD key) or IP. With the game abandoned by Epic, a number of key generators have cropped up, which makes GUID bans useless. IP bans only go so far with VPNs costing $2 these days. The main solutions we have today are IP ban + VPN blocking using a database of known VPN subnets and adding them all to the firewall, and a similar fingerprinting technique which scans th…

> IP bans only go so far with VPNs costing $2 these days. https://redman.xyz/doku.php/schachtmeister2 was made specifically against people using VPNs. It was made for Tremulous (ioquake3 fork) where people kept evading IP bans, but it can be used for any other games. It is not my project, but I know the author, and I could personally fork it and make it suitable for specific (or any) games if there is demand for it.…

Is there still an active tremulous community? I have fond memories of that game.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#335

Post by johnisgood »

amonon wrote: post #334
johnisgood wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IP bans only go so far with VPNs costing $2 these days. https://redman.xyz/doku.php/schachtmeister2 was made specifically against people using VPNs. It was made for Tremulous (ioquake3 fork) where people kept evading IP bans, but it can be used for any other games. It is not my project, but I know the author, and I could personally fork it and make it suitable for specific (or any) games if there is demand for it.…

Is there still an active tremulous community? I have fond memories of that game.

Unfortunately not anymore, everyone moved to Unvanquished[1] (made by ex-Tremulous players).

You are very welcome on their Discord server, or Der Bunker's[2] (Zittrig) Discord server, too!

We may know each other. :)

[1] https://unvanquished.net/ (https://unvanquished.net/chat/)

[2] https://discord.gg/nubnh8PGnG

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#336

Post by snarfy »

voldacar wrote: post #301
snarfy wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's also "illegal" amx plugins and commands, which are generally frowned upon and extremely abusable, but quite useful in these situations. My favorite (which most of the "illegal plugins" are based around) is amx_exec which essentially gives admins direct access to any client's in-game console, to run any command or set any setting! Yes, we have something similar for UT2004, but only a handful of people are ev…

Isn't this a huge security vulnerability for the client?

Yes, it's why I don't share knowledge of it. There are less than 300 people actively playing this game (maybe fewer) so any impact of something like a RCE running wild is relatively small.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#338

Post by kjkjadksj »

grayhatter wrote: post #155
kjkjadksj wrote: post #109

Couldn’t you stop cheaters by just looking at how their telemetry metrics are different from the baseline? If you get to a point where the cheater has to cheat to only be as good as a median player in the lobby in order to evade detection, you’ve effectively neutered it.

How would something like that work?

You’d compare all the telemetry you can from a sample of non cheater users and compare that to the cheater. Chances are the cheat is better than a non cheat user because thats the entire point of cheating. It will probably manifest in stuff like accuracy for aimbots, how fast they train onto a target they see, if they put their reticle on another user through a wall and how often that happens, how they move or jump, etc. theres bound to be some significant difference in some of these or other metric compared to non cheaters. And if there is no significant difference, maybe the cheaters don’t have the edge they thought they did after all and you don’t need to worry about it.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#339

Post by trashburger »

jvanderbot wrote: post #273
fazeirony wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

where was the parent mentioning this is a violation of one's human rights exactly?

Privacy is a human right.

Not when you are willingly connecting to a server. The server owner didn't force you to do it.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#340

Post by 6SixTy »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #156
LinuxAmbulance wrote: post #18

Excellent write up and solution. Cheating in video games makes for a wretched experience for those who don't cheat. It's crazy how rampant cheating in multiplayer games, especially competitive ones has gotten. Ten years ago, I thought it was at an extreme, but it's only gone up since then. Part of the problem is that for some software developers, writing cheats brings in a massive amount of money. So instead of some…

Some competitive multiplayer games. Which seem to be exclusively FPS games with ~10+M players ? I don't even remember the last time when I've heard of a game outside that very narrow (albeit decently popular) category to have complaints about cheaters. Meanwhile for these games, I hear about it like every month, and all this despite this genre being amongst the ones that I play the least !

Any decently competitive scene is going to develop cheaters in some form or another. MOBAs, Minecraft, Fortnite, at minimum I've heard about cheating some form or another. Any speedrunning community is going to face cheaters in some form or another doesn't matter what community you are talking about.

FPS games are kind of the gold standard when it comes to competitive environments, and thus gather cheaters or people complaining about cheaters substantially more than most other game genres.

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