Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

ssno.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 223 posts

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#61

Post by jamesfinlayson »

ackbar03 wrote: post #24
phire wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, should be easy enough to filter these particular jumps out. It's an obfuscation designed to annoy people using common off-the-shelf tools (especially IDA pro) Most obfuscations are only trying to annoy people just enough that they move on to other projects.

What are off the shelf tools/methods people use now? Ida was pretty standard goto when I was into RE

I tried Ghidra recently and the decompilation seemed decent enough. The UI seemed a bit less complete than IDA's though (I couldn't see a couple of things that IDA does/has though they might just be hidden away in menus).

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#62

Post by minihat »

b3lvedere wrote: post #59
mdswanson wrote: post #57

A 2-year legal battle with Activision to overturn a false permanent ban. Activision showed up with zero evidence of cheating and lost: https://antiblizzard.win/2025/01/18/my-two-year-fight-agains...

Holy ….. what a fight you had to do. So glad i hardly play any mulitiplayer shooter games. I’d hate to have my insane Steam library stripped away from me.

His steam library was not restricted, just the game in which he was accused/banned.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#63

Post by 0xC0ncord »

adiabatichottub wrote: post #5

I'm very curious about the jump obfuscation. Maybe somebody who's done more reverse-engineering can answer this for me: a) Are unconditional jumps common enough that they couldn't be filtered out with some set of pre-conditions? b) It seems like finding the end of a function would be easy, because there's a return. Is there some way to analyze the stack so that you know where a function is returning to, then look for…

This video[1] on reverse-engineering parts of Guitar Hero 3 covers a few similar techniques that were used to heavily obfuscate the game code that you might find interesting.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9U5wK_boYM

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#64

Post by buzer »

mdswanson wrote: post #57

A 2-year legal battle with Activision to overturn a false permanent ban. Activision showed up with zero evidence of cheating and lost: https://antiblizzard.win/2025/01/18/my-two-year-fight-agains...

> This ban also ruined other games for me. If I ever did well in a game, someone would look at my profile to see how many hours I have and instantly see the red marker that shows “I am a cheater”.

I wonder if that label can be considered to be libel. Probably harder in the US, but from what I understand in UK (or just England?) the defendant must prove that it's true.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#65

Post by mrsaint »

shj2105 wrote: post #2

Where did you learn how to do this? I would love to learn more about understanding half of what this article said but I don’t know how to start.

My recipe: "Windows 95 System Programming Secrets" by Matt Pietrek and "Unauthorized Windows 95" by Andrew Schulman, years of fooling around with NuMega SoftICE, lots of IRC, lost youth, yet lots of fun.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#66

Post by kamikazechaser »

shj2105 wrote: post #2

Where did you learn how to do this? I would love to learn more about understanding half of what this article said but I don’t know how to start.

UnknownCheats. I'm active there and it has one of the best resources on this kind of stuff. I'm more interested in how Linux userspace Anti-cheats works notably VAC.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#67

Post by darksaints »

mdswanson wrote: post #57

A 2-year legal battle with Activision to overturn a false permanent ban. Activision showed up with zero evidence of cheating and lost: https://antiblizzard.win/2025/01/18/my-two-year-fight-agains...

I got a false permanent ban as well. Despite the fact that cheating is damn near impossible on consoles, and the fact that I worked way too long to get to an absolutely mediocre rank (gold 1) on ranked play, and the fact that I had never even had a warning or complaint for any behavior whatsoever, they permanently banned me with no explanation.

Unlike the blogpost, I just decided I would just never spend any money on an Activision product ever again. It's what everybody should do.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#68

Post by OSButler »

Dalewyn wrote: post #48
Salgat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the old days, before even xbox, online play was almost exclusively on computers on privately hosted servers, so you had mods actively banning anyone who gave any hint of cheating.

That doesn't refute my point, though; probably supports it, even. Private server owners went scorched earth in ye olde days because cheating was (and still is) a huge problem.

As a player it was just less annoying back in the dedicated server days, since cheaters were dealt with immediately. Nowadays you have to report them in most of the competitive games and then it can take anywhere from several hours to weeks before anything happens. It just feels like the protections have become more and more invasive, yet are still far behind the original community managed servers from back in the day.

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#69

Post by sitzkrieg »

mrsaint wrote: post #65
shj2105 wrote: post #2

Where did you learn how to do this? I would love to learn more about understanding half of what this article said but I don’t know how to start.

My recipe: "Windows 95 System Programming Secrets" by Matt Pietrek and "Unauthorized Windows 95" by Andrew Schulman, years of fooling around with NuMega SoftICE, lots of IRC, lost youth, yet lots of fun.

i miss softice so much (but not fixing my clock)

Re: Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat

#70

Post by gambiting »

darksaints wrote: post #67
mdswanson wrote: post #57

A 2-year legal battle with Activision to overturn a false permanent ban. Activision showed up with zero evidence of cheating and lost: https://antiblizzard.win/2025/01/18/my-two-year-fight-agains...

I got a false permanent ban as well. Despite the fact that cheating is damn near impossible on consoles, and the fact that I worked way too long to get to an absolutely mediocre rank (gold 1) on ranked play, and the fact that I had never even had a warning or complaint for any behavior whatsoever, they permanently banned me with no explanation. Unlike the blogpost, I just decided I would just never spend any money on…

>>Despite the fact that cheating is damn near impossible on consoles

Unfortunately, aim assist devices for consoles are very widespread now and a big problem for competitive gaming. .

>>I had never even had a warning or complaint for any behavior whatsoever

That's the gold standard in the industry though, you don't warn(suspected) cheaters to not give them opportunity to adjust their tactics. Sorry you got caught by this unfairly.

Post reply on HN