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We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

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Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#51

Post by oneplane »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #30
anamexis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there more sophisticated cheat developers though?

Cheat development these days is incredibly sophisticated. There are swathes of tutorials, old and recent examples to research, advanced inspection tools, etc. It's so much easier to make cheats today than it was, say, 10 years ago. It's also easier because more and more games are sharing common infrastructure like game engines, as compared to the past. What works in one Unreal game may save you a lot of time developi…

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 parts (like "is something sneaking some reads from the memory the game engine uses to clip models?"), which is ultimately not something you will win as a game developer (DMA/Hardware attacks or even just frame grabbing the eDP or LVDS signal and intercepting the USB HID traffic has been on the market for quite a while).

But implausible actions and results for a player can only be attributed to luck so many times. Do 30 360noscope flick headshots in a row on a brand new account and you can be pretty sure something is wrong.

If we can get plausibility vs. luck sorted out to a degree where the method of cheating no longer matters, that's when the tide turns. Works for pure bots as well. But it's difficult to do, and probably not something every developer is able/willing to develop or invest in.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#52

Post by kemitche »

Retr0id wrote: post #34

> Wonderful, we have found a way to silently persist a cookie for each player as they join the server. This violates GDPR, no? Edit: It sounds like this took place before GDPR was being enforced.

GDPR isn't a blanket ban on cookies. You don't require a cookie notice for strictly necessary cookies, which you have a "grounds of legitimate interest" for: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...

Fraud prevention is listed as an example of a "legitimate interest."

So no, by my layman's interpretation, they would not have been bound by GDPR to notify the user of cookies or other fingerprinting used solely for anti-cheat. They'd run into trouble if they use that same ID for marketing/advertising without consent, though.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#53

Post by ketkev »

beeboobaa3 wrote: post #12

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

I'm not a lawyer, but I think this actually has some interesting things to think about. Not all cookies require consent under the ePrivacy directive, there is an exception for cookies that are "strictly necessary for the delivery of a service requested by the user". I think that'd fit in this case, since providing a cheater free experience is part of the "service" the players are looking for. At the same time, the ePrivacy directive also mentions that the user should be provided with "clear and comprehensive information" about what is stored. Providing that would render the cookies useless.

I don't know how these would balance each other out legally, but it's fun to think about

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#54

Post by Joel_Mckay »

In general, hardware/GPU/MAC signature hash checks are the only consistent way to bind player account histories, and even then cheats will change their identity with new hardware on fake postal addresses. Best to add a few weeks delay with "reviewing" ban status to prevent them returning hardware to retailers. Each day randomly permute which hardware signature trips the auto-re-ban after a random number of minutes.

Cheaters ruin the fun for everyone including themselves. Admins need to provide a personal cost deterrent for problem users, and randomly hang the game for people using code mods.

Let the ban hammer fall =3

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#55

Post by ketkev »

unsnap_biceps wrote: post #32
beeboobaa3 wrote: post #12

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

GDPR didn't take effect until May 2018, this only worked until October 2017.

GDPR is about the processing of personal data. Cookies (and such) are subject to 2002's ePrivacy directive

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#56

Post by jsheard »

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.

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

Well, you can on PC at least. Xbox and Playstation security has matured to the point that code modification in online games isn't really a thing anymore, the worst they have to deal with is controller macros most of the time.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#57

Post by lagadu »

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.)

Because at the end of the day the game is running on the user's machine, a machine in which the user has full access to every part of the execution and the software developer does not. You can only get around that by streaming the game instead of running it on the client side and even then an aimbot or some type of automation would be possible nowadays.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#59

Post by bob1029 »

willcipriano wrote: post #42
Night_Thastus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 const…

This is kind of getting into my idea - Statistical methods & maybe a sprinkle of old-school machine learning.

What I would try is to hire a red team & blue team and put them in a sandbox environment. The red team cheats on purpose. The blue team is guaranteed to be playing legitimately. Both teams label their session data accurately. I then use this as training & eval set for a model that will be used on actual player inputs.

The only downside is that you will get a certain % of false positives, but the tradeoff is that there is literally nothing the cheaters can do to prevent detection unless they infiltrate your internal operations and obtain access to the data and/or methods.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#60

Post by ghxst »

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…

This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies. Have you considered more advanced network analysis? It's one of the areas I have an interest in (professionally and personally) so if you want any suggestions let me know.
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