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

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

#81

Post by heromal »

codebje wrote: post #62
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one could say it's critical to stop hackers. It's never critical to stop hackers in a videogame IMO. We need to stop being so damn serious about gaming .

Rampant cheating will wreck competitive multiplayer games fast, so there are perspectives from which this critical. (I’d still lean towards expecting game houses to find another way, kernel drivers are still client side trust mechanisms).

I think the point is that competitive multiplayer games are not critical. Scripting in e.g. league of legends probably doesn't register on 99% of humanities "top 100 most critical things in my life" radar.

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

#82

Post by Cthulhu_ »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #73
PaulHoule wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is written in C you can always introduce a buffer overflow or something similar by just adding a little bit of line noise here or there and nobody can prove it was deliberate.

It's closed source and the assembly is obfuscated. You don't even need to bother with plausible debiability.

Surely the NSA has tools, people, resources etc to figure that out?

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

#84

Post by Cthulhu_ »

bravetraveler wrote: post #37
jsheard wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I wanted to deploy a trojan horse then the last place I would try to hide it is in an anti-cheat driver that will without any doubt be exhaustively analysed by people attempting to bypass it.

Gamers are great targets. They'll disable security for higher polling rates. Not discerning, gladly walk to the slaughterhouse.

But also there's parties there with a big interest in circumventing these securities, and have done so for decades. The new release of RDR for PC (shamefully asking $50 for a 14 year old game) was cracked within days, if not earlier, of its releae.

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

#85

Post by Cthulhu_ »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #71
Thaxll wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheats and bots are ruining online games though.

Perhaps, but it's far better to have cheaters and bots than to have games require a rootkit to play them.

Well no, because they ruin the online experience making people not play the game.

(in theory, GTA online has had / still has huge problems with bots and cheats but still earns the publisher hundreds of millions a year)

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

#86

Post by a_wild_dandan »

evoke4908 wrote: post #41
plopz wrote: post #32

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.

I think the problem is that that kind of work requires a good deal of developer resources for a long time. What company wants to pay upkeep on a shipped product? You could save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by shipping a rootkit to players and not worrying about server security.

I suppose Valve, who trained a neural network to detect/ban cheaters exhibiting unnatural behavior.

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

#87

Post by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 »

Thaxll wrote: post #47
throwaway48476 wrote: post #2

After the crowdstrike disaster 3rd party kernel drivers need to be shunned for non critical applications. Games publishers have been bad actors in this space for a long time now. The genshin impact anticheat was used in a malware campaign. Rockstar was very misleading trying to imply their kernel driver not being compatible with the steam deck was valves fault.

Cheats and bots are ruining online games though.

Back when communities hosted servers instead of companies, it seemed less common, even though it was easier to do.

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

#88

Post by NekkoDroid »

jsheard wrote: post #31
butterfly42069 wrote: post #28

The biggest giveaway the kernel level anti cheat is stupid is that Easy Anti-Cheat works on Linux without kernel level access.

It only works on Linux if the developer allows it, because it's not nearly as effective on Linux. Rust (the game not the language) uses EAC but doesn't run on Linux by choice for example. Neither does Fortnite. Apex Legends uses EAC and does run on Linux, and now nearly every public cheat for that game targets the Linux version because it's such a soft target. I don't really like the status quo of installing random k…

Still wondering what kinda special sauce that Blizzard is using in Overwatch. In my literal thousands of hours of playtime I encountered so few blatant cheaters its probably still in the double digit. Are there probably a good amount of cheaters I didn't realize were cheaters? probably, but does it really matter if you don't realize they are cheating?

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

#89

Post by heromal »

baseballdork wrote: post #27
arp242 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to prevent cheating from the server-side only. Something like an aimbot can operate purely on information you need to have as a client (to render the other players on the screen), and still be a huge advantage because it can respond faster than any human can.

Shouldn't that be detectable?

Without kernel level anti cheat you can detect (some) other usermode cheats, but not kernel level cheats. With kernel level anticheat, you can detect the vast majority of other kernel level cheats. Vanguard is effective enough that most successful cheaters are using external devices and DMA to bypass the kernel altogether (or they just use Macs because Apple doesn't allow Vanguard). And despite Riot's insistence to the contrary, they have not "detected" DMA cheats.

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

#90

Post by keyringlight »

billyoyo wrote: post #80
umvi wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah life sucks when everything and everyone has to be untrusted (applies not just video games). The solution is to build trusted spaces again IMO. For video games assume that each user is trusted by default. As soon as they violate that trust by cheating, they are banned permanently for that copy of the game. If they want to be trusted again they have to buy another copy of the game to get another license. Make it h…

This is a naive take. Of course these developers already permaban cheaters. Firstly many of these games are free to play so "getting another license" is a non issue. They're doing hardware bans nowadays which are harder to avoid but not impossible. Half the battle is detection though. If you don't detect cheaters quick enough they ruin enough games that genuine players start getting frustrated and leave. Anti cheats…

It's going on a tangent, but one naive take which continues to amuse me when it comes up is community/third party servers and policing of cheating. As though delegating that responsibility is the goal or that it would scale to handle the size of modern playerbases including the ratio of admins to players to be able to monitor and respond to (alleged) cheaters
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