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We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

mobeigi.com

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Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#41

Post by jandrese »

Giorgi wrote: post #3

Thinking about it, steam should force this on every game developer that has cheating problem (I am assuming mainly shooters), maybe implemented better fingerprinting way, giving developers options to hide cookies somewhere in folders of their choosing.

The problem is that once a technique like this becomes standardized the cheat software will know how to automatically disable it. Even in the article it points out that had the cheaters put in the work they could have edited a single text file to break the system, but they did not. If this solution had been implemented for all CS:GO players then it would have been defeated fairly quickly, but since it was just one set of servers those were easy enough for the cheaters to avoid.

That said, eyeballing the chart in the article you can see an enormous ban wave that happens when the system is turned on, but afterwards the total level of cheating quickly returns to roughly where it started. If there were long term impacts it was only in the reduction of staff hours needed to review game footage to determine if a player is cheating.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#42

Post by willcipriano »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #13
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.

Only problem is, a lot of companies do NOT want to pay for it. It's 'treadmill work'. No matter how many people and how much money you throw at the problem, it still ends up just coming back. It's a losing battle because there are many, many more players than there are developers.

My idea:

1. Determine minimum human reaction times and limit movement to within those parameters on the client side. (For example a human can't swing their view around [in a fps] in a microsecond so make that impossible on the client) this will require a lot of user testing to get right, get pro players and push their limits.

2. Build a 'unified field theory' for your game world that is aware of the client side constraints as well as limits on character movement, reload times, bullet velocities, etc. Run this [much smaller than the real game] simulation on server.

3. Ban any user who sends input that violates physics.

Now cheating has to at look like high level play instead of someone flying around spinbotting everyone from across the map. Players hopefully don't get as frustrated when playing against cheaters as they assume they are just great players. Great players should be competitive against cheaters as well.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#43

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#44

Post by colechristensen »

DJBunnies wrote: post #29
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…

I think a better question here is: why is game code so exploitable? A: laziness and cost. It just doesn’t matter the same way that baking code matters, I guess. So they toss on some cheap anti cheat instead of architecting it safely (expensively.)

This isn't the better question.

When you have software running locally, you can arbitrarily modify how it runs.

Like an aimbot is a powerful cheat, and there's no amount of security that can prevent one from being used outside of an anticheat being able to look deep into what your system is doing, what it contains. The only way to prevent that kind of thing is to remove your control of your own computer.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#46

Post by kemitche »

leetbulb wrote: post #26

This isn't about stopping cheaters (cheat detection). This is about stopping repeat cheaters trying to ban evade. Detecting cheats, especially nowadays with hardware cheats (DMA, etc), is an entirely different ballgame. IMHO, one of the most effective way to stop ban evaders is to actually charge money for the game.

At the time of the events in the blog, CS:GO was NOT free, and yet there were still cheaters that apparently had access to 80+ accounts.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#47

Post by mobeigi »

beeboobaa3 wrote: post #12

I hope they asked permissions for storing those cookies. Otherwise they're violating various EU laws.

Great point!

This community is Australian & New Zealand based, we had 0 European players or visitors. And as @unsnap_biceps this predated GDPR compliance.

You are right though that you wouldn't be able to do this in Europe today because asking for fingerprinting consent defeats the purpose because the hacker would likely quickly figure out what is happing and circumvent it.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#49

Post by Ekaros »

colechristensen wrote: post #44
DJBunnies wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better question here is: why is game code so exploitable? A: laziness and cost. It just doesn’t matter the same way that baking code matters, I guess. So they toss on some cheap anti cheat instead of architecting it safely (expensively.)

This isn't the better question. When you have software running locally, you can arbitrarily modify how it runs. Like an aimbot is a powerful cheat, and there's no amount of security that can prevent one from being used outside of an anticheat being able to look deep into what your system is doing, what it contains. The only way to prevent that kind of thing is to remove your control of your own computer.

And even then you could do aimbot with camera pointed on the screen and either faking a mouse or providing sensor sufficient data somehow to simulate movement... That is reach super human reaction times and accuracy...

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#50

Post by Matheus28 »

DJBunnies wrote: post #29
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…

I think a better question here is: why is game code so exploitable? A: laziness and cost. It just doesn’t matter the same way that baking code matters, I guess. So they toss on some cheap anti cheat instead of architecting it safely (expensively.)

It’s not that simple.

Some games aren’t able to prevent cheating. The client has the data on where the enemies on their screen are. The cheat only needs to move the mouse and click on the enemies heads. Other games like MMORPGs involve the cheat just playing the game and farming on behalf of the player.

It just becomes a cat and mouse game where the anti cheat is trying to detect something hooking into the game process while the cheat tries to hide itself.

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