Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:40 AM UTC

dietr1ch wrote: post #272

skizm wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter strike player, I definitely shy away from the invasive anti cheat stuff… but I’d let valve inject it into my veins if it meant I could actually play and not suspect everyone of cheating all the time. Mostly because Valve has earned my trust. I won’t install games from other companies using similarly invasive techniques though.

While I trust valve, I'm not willing to mess up with my workstation to play. Also, there's hardware cheats, so I don't need a rootkit on my machine, but a server side thing that properly weeds bad players out through reports/trust and automated bans.

> a server side thing that properly weeds bad players out through reports/trust and automated bans.

No. No no no.

Automated bans via the report system is very well-known to be abused.

Even if you implement a "trust" system where initially, all your reports are manually verified by game staff until its determined your reports are correct until your reports are acted on automatically, all it takes is a player to just be "good" until their trust is high enough, then start reporting people who don't actually deserve it.

And I'm not convinced that server-side anti-cheat can be effective. You have to rely entirely on heuristics. Sure, a simple aim-bot that instantly snaps someone's aim right on someone's head might be detectable, but one that simply lets you see through walls certainly won't be if the player doesn't make it stupidly obvious by pre-aiming around every corner.

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

#362

Post by marcus_holmes » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:42 AM UTC

Brian_K_White wrote: post #34

hypeatei wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? The current PC gaming model where things run on a machine controlled by the user is fundamentally against solving the issue of cheats. You can't prevent everything server-side.

Not our problem. The problem of cheating in games does not weigh more than the users ultimate ownership of and control over their own property. No one has a right to a business model. They can do plenty enough server-side. It's not a blocking problem at all, it's just easier to take over all control of the users pc for your own convenience. Everything, including all valid goals, is easier if you could just have the p…

I basically agree with this. Which is why I run a Linux box for gaming, and why I don't play games that have this problem.

I used to play Quake-likes, and there are people who are just that good out there, but it assuages the ego so much more to call them cheaters. I saw this all the time on CS - as soon as someone even halfway good joined, everyone called them a cheater and the game dissolved. I eventually realised that this is not an anti-cheating problem, but a community/personality problem with the people that like playing these games. So I stopped.

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

#363

Post by nox101 » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:43 AM UTC

dbrueck wrote: post #176

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…

Do you think it will escalate to the point that client side checks will be worthless? Say in 5yrs I can let an AI watch the screen and control the mouse and keyboard. From the rootkitted computer, it can't tell I used an external AI to control the USB keyboard and mouse.

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

#364

Post by andyferris » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:44 AM UTC

jhardy54 wrote: post #288

froggit wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that matter? Pretty sure running in a VM doesn't facilitate cheating.

Running a VM gives the parent the ability to read/write arbitrary memory without [even rootkit] anticheat being able to detect, which can facilitate cheating, and therefore can earn you bans. The whole point of the rootkit is that the game can confirm that you don’t have any way to read/write arbitrary memory.

Isn't Windows running under a hyper-v hypervisor these days anyway?

In practice, I'd settle for a peer Windows OS, like the WSL2 kernel, with the rootkit seperate from my main work one. Can I run two copies of Windows simultaneously as peers?

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

#365

Post by Jach » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:44 AM UTC

j-bos wrote: post #287

tw04 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, this is why we have consoles. We can have rootkits, or we can have cheating. Nobody has solved cheat prevention without rootkits. If you can, you’d make millions, if not billions. It’s not like the game creators want to have software on your system that has the potential to brick your system.

By this logic wouldn't chess and go need to be played after cavity searches? Cheating is enabled by tech but based on what people decide to do.

Not sure if you're referencing it but there was a recent scandal where it was suspected someone playing against Magnus might have had a wireless butt plug to enable some cheating...

The sibling comment makes a point about anonymity, I find these discussions interesting in comparison with the only online competitive game I play these days. It's Tekken, and neither the current rendition nor the previous one had any real form of anti-cheat. For the current Tekken 8, supposedly some players have been banned after manual review from the company of replay data, which of course doesn't scale. But at the same time it doesn't really matter. Cheaters don't seem to be that prevalent, their ability to spoil the experience of a match is limited by the fact that matches are short, and people can spoil the experience in non-cheating ways like plugging, lag switching, using a weak computer, and for some sensitive players they'll get unreasonably upset by ki charging/teabagging/taunting/continuing an attack after KO. The status of the highest rank is also not that much -- the most status comes from performing well at the big in-person tournaments, where it's going to be harder to cheat and players are somewhat de-anonymized. If the positive incentives to cheat are minimized in the first place, you don't need so many negative incentives like rootkits.

(It always amazes me how custom controllers and even keyboards are allowed in fighting game tournaments, officially certain macros are banned and at least for Street Fighter certain modes of leverless controllers got banned, but it'd be hard to perfectly enforce. And it's been hilarious to see the increasing use of fake buttons or controller-hiding covers/jackets because it was assumed some players were able to see inputs out of their peripheral vision before they were registered in-game and adjust.)

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

#366

Post by akira2501 » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:46 AM UTC

rkharsan64 wrote: post #354

akira2501 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question would be can't the netcode be improved to prevent this in the first place? The fact that all players receive full game state enables this. In the early 2000s this made sense. Does it still today?

That will only protect you against wall hacks. This is a strategy known as fog of war. The server will not send the positions of players far from you. However, you still need to send the positions of players near you, but still behind walls, otherwise lag compensation won't work properly. This doesn't protect you against trigger bots (shoot automatically when you put your mouse on a target), aim bots (snap to targets…

> lag compensation

That's already done entirely server side. It could only be. If you mean predictive positioning from the client side you can do that with far less state than gets transmitted today, and you could factor in the other players momentum on the server side to see if prediction would even be necessary in a given frame or not.

The server could also send lots of phantom updates so the player client has no idea which objects are real and which aren't. The hacks could work around this but it would take a lot of power to do so. There's room for asymmetric counterhacks here.

As for the other types of bots those are far less useful and more detectable by naked eye without wallhacks, which ironically, is because lag compensation is server side, these hacks do not have a deterministic outcome when used.

When you look at a video of what a wallhack enables and how much state data gets transmitted that shouldn't be, I would be embarrassed to have such unworthy netcode in the 2020s. They've had 20 years and have done next to nothing.

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

#367

Post by tpxl » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:47 AM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #108

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #12

I built a dedicated gaming PC a couple of years ago. Too much cowboy coding in the industry for me to feel safe running this code on my main computer. Even games for which I pay have supposedly* been scanning/uploading personal data presumably for some adtech purposes. Why should I ever trust a gaming company to take security seriously? There was a story a few years ago about how one guy at home debugged GTA5’s atroc…

Oh yeah, that was down to a huge JSON file / slow JSON parser or something wasn't it? That was so bad.

They wrote their own json parser which used strlen() all over the place, which is O(n), resulting in O(n^2) complexity for json parsing. The guy shimmed the function to return a cached response if it was called with the same string consecutively, which it was for parsing the JSON. The JSON contained the items in the real-money store btw.

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

#368

Post by tpxl » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:51 AM UTC

dark-star wrote: post #172

mattigames wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, that's why I added quotes around "owned", so in other words what I meant is that the EU should force Steam to create the option to transfer that license among its own users.

Yeah but I can just assume that this would also apply to e.g. Microsoft Windows licenses, and that Microsoft lobbies strongly against such a law (also every other vendor who locks software licenses to a particular end-user or licensee) Note that I wouldn't very much welcome such a law but I wouldn't bet on it happening any time soon

You can, and people do, resell Windows licenses in Europe. Microsoft seethes about it, but can go fuck itself, because this is legal.

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

#369

Post by mrtksn » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 5:52 AM UTC

WatchDog wrote: post #320

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…

In other words, tech based solutions to human problems always fails at some point probably because the problem creators can also use tech.

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

#370

Post by Aeolun » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 6:01 AM UTC

neilv wrote: post #339

yreg wrote: post #195

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.

One of the reasons I run a PS5 instead. 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".

You mean all the anti-cheat options are pre-built into your rig?