331–340 of 660 posts
kernel level anticheat is not enough. client inputs have to be trusted, and there is no provenance. the kernel has no visibility of inputs. i’m shipping a 100 player matchmaking game now. clients tick at 360hz, server ticks at 120hz. fair up to 60 ping, which covers entire continents. servers are metal, not vms. epyc 4244p with 2Gbps egress, 1 server per 15 minute game. mitigations=off and nosmt on all clients and th…
kernel level anticheat is not enough. client inputs have to be trusted, and there is no provenance. the kernel has no visibility of inputs. i’m shipping a 100 player matchmaking game now. clients tick at 360hz, server ticks at 120hz. fair up to 60 ping, which covers entire continents. servers are metal, not vms. epyc 4244p with 2Gbps egress, 1 server per 15 minute game. mitigations=off and nosmt on all clients and th…
honestly, we have consoles for this dude
anyone playing fortnite ranked already has the needed hardware, and the motivation.
if you haven’t won a solo build game on 1440p 360hz, you haven’t ever actually played a video game.
Why anti-cheat software utilizes kernel drivers (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42001030 - Oct 2024 (50 comments)
The anti-cheat problem is long-running and complicated. If you choose not to run anti-cheat because you understand that these are opaque rootkits, good for you! That's a totally, 100% valid choice. But please keep in mind: - you are a tiny minority and not the target customer - online multiplayer games are an absurdly big business (i.e. there are huge incentives here) - no, you can't completely solve this server side…
Why isn't server-side anticheat a possible solution? Cheats can spoof inputs purely through visual output as well, meaning there cannot be full trust client-side.
Esps are purely client side, they read actors from game's memory and draw a client side overlay. It's impossible to protect against these on the server. Even if you had perfect culling from the server (didn't send players behind walls for example) you'd still have semitransparent surfaces like foliage and smoke. There are people making good money in PUBG just making enemy textures that are easier to see. You need kernel anticheat to prevent the cheat reading the memory. Also you want to take screenshots periodically and detect overlays.
Aimbots in the olden days could be detected on the server because their movements were instant, precise, unnatural snaps. But these days cheat developers have wisened up. Again the best protection is to prevent the cheat from reading the games memory in the first place, some anticheats go as far as to try to prevent input from any artificial device (so the cheat can't create mouse movement)
There are also movement hacks, but I don't think that these are really common these days. You can detect protect against these on the server side
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>some things Any specific examples? I hear this said all the time and it's almost never true. Movement, for example: many decide to just let clients be fully authoritative over their positions and then act shocked when teleport hacks drop. Just keep track of the player's max move speed server-side, continually validate, and flag if they consistently move faster than is possible according to the server. No one is ever…
It's not teleporting that's hard to deal with, it's aimbots and wall hacks. You have to trust the client with enemy position information that it shouldn't be able to see yet, and trust their shot position inputs. Also, constantly flying around and teleporting is easy to catch, but using it in small bursts is very powerful and harder to catch.
That seems like something that would be solvable with location-style differential privacy. Report a number of plausible locations to the client small enough that it can efficiently anticipate them all, but large enough to prevent being able to auto-aim or wall hack. Run some bots or actual player movements recorded from other matches, originating from roughly the same point where you last saw the real opponent.
>constantly flying around and teleporting is easy to catch, but using it in small bursts is very powerful and harder to catch
Even small violations of continuity seem like they'd be observable server-side, no? I've not studied this, but presumably clients must be constantly phoning home with their position.
With the way that computer vision and AI continue to improve, I imagine that we will soon have completely external and undetectable cheating peripherals, simply capture the screen direct from the display output, and pass inputs via mimicking a usb human input device. This won’t provide all the same capabilities as cheats that hook into the game process, such as wall hacks, but it would be possible to build a super hu…
This already exists. You can stream your screen to another machine running image recognition and pass your mouse input through a controller that injects auxiliary input (there are off-the-shelf products like kmbox, you can make your own as well).
However, it is very important to understand that only a tiny percentage of cheaters in games end up being determined enough to go through hoops to purchase hardware for it (it's much more expensive and not as simple as getting instant gratification by double clicking on an executable). It's basically considered a win to push people into needing go to such lengths to cheat without getting banned.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While all of what you're saying is true, I think it is worth noting that historically a large chunk of this problem was solved by communities hosting servers. I agree that in the matchmaking era, remote attestation via kernel-level anticheat is the inevitable solution that you converge to after a few iterations. And yes, servers would often kick out people who were too outside of the general skill level, even if they…
> historically a large chunk of this problem was solved by communities hosting servers Yes and no. I lived through that era too, and there are serious scaling problems: at some point, trying to banhammer griefers with rotating IPs becomes a full time job, and then the public servers turn into a dumpster fire.
I've just reinstalled GTA V last week and I was very surprised to find out that I now have to install a rootkit to run it. They had the balls to add a mandatory kernel extension into a game that I've bought 10 years ago and that I wish to play in single player only. I find it utterly ridiculous. As usual, piracy would have been the superior experience.
AFAIK, there's fewer cheaters on PlayStation current-gen than on PC, and I don't have to worry about anti-cheat kludges corrupting my "rig".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think server side statistical analysis can go a long way to detect stuff like that. Obviously its always a cat and mouse game between devs and cheaters, and there are always workarounds, but theres a lot more the devs could be doing without relying on invasive client side detection.
You can tune the aimbot to be as good as the server allows, maybe with a bit of variation to throw it off. And realistically, some real non-cheating players will by chance just have similar statistics to bots, especially since the bots will start doing their best to mimic real players. Also many players don't need to cheat all the time; just in that critical moment when it really matters. Didn't Magnus Carlsen say he…
The difference is that IRL chess and a typical FPS game have very different availability of datasets. IRL chess has both fewer moves per game, and fewer games played in short succession than typical FPS games. Also, with FPS games there is a single metric to evaluate -- the shot landed or missed -- compared with chess where moves are ranked on a scale.
So I'd argue that it would be much easier to do a statistical model to predict a cheating aimbot than it would a cheating IRL chess player. I don't believe Magnus's proposition holds for prolific online chess players when they do dozens or more blitz/bullet games in a single day.