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We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

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Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#91

Post by daghamm »

ultimafan wrote: post #76

Cheating in online games is a scourge and I really don't understand why people do it. It's one person selfishly getting a "win" at the expense of ~60 other people in that match having their time, pleasure, potentially money absolutely wasted. I think even more infuriating than blatant hacking is this epidemic of "micro cheating" for lack of a better way to put it that I've seen prevalent in some games that just boost…

Cheating is also big business. Players can pay big bucks to rent (!) a cheat.

IIRC there is an episode on darkness diaries podcast about this.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#92

Post by ghxst »

kelnos wrote: post #70
ghxst wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies Is latency going to be good enough on mobile data (especially if they're also using proxies) for a FPS, though? Sure, they're using cheating software, but I wouldn't be surprised if the software gets the information it needs to cheat too late often enough for it to be useful.

Yes the latency is not nearly as bad as you might think, it's comparable to a VPN in my experience, though the quality will depend on your location and the available connections.

Sophisticated cheats in games like CSGO (and other competitive shooters) are usually very subtle, such as displaying enemies on the mini-map when they shouldn't be visible which provides a major advantage without requiring superhuman input, and the added latency is often negligible—especially when the info can be relayed to teammates and now you essentially have the entire team cheating with only 1 player suffering from a bit of increased latency.

And I wouldn't say this is an edge case either as in my experience the majority of cheaters I encountered are individuals that play on an alt account and offer a service to guarantee wins in ranked games.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#93

Post by wbl »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #37
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.)

> I think a better question here is: why is game code so exploitable? The nature of FPS games means only environment integrity can stop cheating. It's not exploitable per se. Just the game skill can be done by a computer perfectly. Conversely who knows how long it will take for AIs to play Hearthstone with never-before-seen-cards well.

Probably three years

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#94

Post by ghxst »

gosub100 wrote: post #82
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…

Just curious if IP bans work with IPv6 or if they are fundamentally incompatible?

IP bans are fundementally flawed since you can't assume a static IP in the vast majority of cases anymore, if you rely on an IP blocklist then it's inevitable that you will end up hurting the experience of small amount of unlucky but innocent players. I suppose this might be more of an issue on ipv4 than it could be on ipv6, but really you should always expire IP bans to avoid issues like these, or you want to combine another data point with the IP such as a hardware ID (or a hash of a combination of hardware IDs). Cheaters do know this so even if we could assign everyone a static ipv6 they would likely just disable ipv6 support on their NIC and rely on their ipv4 exit ip.

Edit: If you don't think this is an issue I urge you to Google "pokemon go belgium ip ban" for a fun rabbit hole.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#95

Post by numpad0 »

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.)

Oh, that's an easy one.

- GOOD software are simple and easy to understand, which makes it EASY to cheat.

- BAD software are needlessly complex and finicky, so it's HARD to rig it for a cheat.

- Anti-cheats intentionally make software BAD and over-complicated, so cheaters would have hard time modifying it. But computers are brittle and also aren't smarter than humans so cheaters will eventually find a way.

- Security is completely irrelevant topic since game clients are "bought" and run on your hardware; Digital Restrictions Management built to work against you as user is anti-consumer, anti-right-to-repair, anti-human, super bad thing, and lots of efforts are made to keep PC away from it as much as practical.

It has nothing to do with laziness or cost. If anything it'll be the best programmed game that gets hacked fastest. And PS2 that gets emulated last.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#96

Post by Night_Thastus »

oneplane wrote: post #81
Night_Thastus wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to balance around those sorts of things. For example, imagine a cheat that gives the player additional info about where enemies are and their state (ie: health). Even if they are of totally normal skill level in terms of movement and aim, that info will allow them to be substantially better than others. How are you going to detect that, and differentiate it from players who simply have a great sense of map…

Even the base example would make that specific scenario trivial: an account that is new has no business "being better" than everyone else. The only group you'd punish with that is skilled players that lose their account (and create a new one), but if you use a moving skill window they can grow back into their plausibility pretty quickly, and it's a small cost compared to everything else. And you could even mitigate t…

What about new players who are competitive in other, similar titles, and thus start off with a strong advantage?

And - what about experienced players who cheat?

In some scenes, it's actually more often that cheaters are some of the best, most experienced players who have a strong competitive lean and feel they 'deserve' to win, so use cheats to get an edge. It's far more common than you'd think.

That's the problem with any anti-cheat system. It's all the what-ifs. Every single 'clever idea' that has been theorized under the sun has been tried and most have failed.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#97

Post by ghxst »

maccard wrote: post #86
andrewia wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a very naïve way of looking at game development. There are many reasons why games are exploitable besides lack of reasonable dev effort. - Almost all games are going to use a licensed or shared game engine. That means the softwsre architecture is already known to skilled cheat developers with reverse engineering skills. - Obfuscating the game will only go so far, as demonstrated by the mixed success of…

A couple of thoughts, but I largely agree with you. > Obfuscating the game will only go so far, as demonstrated by the mixed success of Denuvo DRM. Denuvo is for the most part DRM, rather than anticheat. It's goal is to stop people pirating the game during the launch window. > The game will not be the most privileged process on the machine, while cheaters are glad to allow root/kernel access to cheats. This ship has…

It's not AI enabled cheats that are the issue, it's DMA through things like PCIe devices disguised as regular hardware. Sophisticated cheats no longer run on the same computer as you're playing on. Google "pcie dma cheat" for a fun rabbit hole.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#98

Post by ghxst »

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.)

A very large amount of games that are released nowadays all use well known and well documented engines, that's what makes it a lot easier, there's an interview on YouTube with a company that develops cheats for multiple games that mention this here: https://youtu.be/zwruk-tLIOU?si=3O2jBKQneur-n3iS

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#99

Post by heavenlyblue »

maccard wrote: post #86
andrewia wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a very naïve way of looking at game development. There are many reasons why games are exploitable besides lack of reasonable dev effort. - Almost all games are going to use a licensed or shared game engine. That means the softwsre architecture is already known to skilled cheat developers with reverse engineering skills. - Obfuscating the game will only go so far, as demonstrated by the mixed success of…

A couple of thoughts, but I largely agree with you. > Obfuscating the game will only go so far, as demonstrated by the mixed success of Denuvo DRM. Denuvo is for the most part DRM, rather than anticheat. It's goal is to stop people pirating the game during the launch window. > The game will not be the most privileged process on the machine, while cheaters are glad to allow root/kernel access to cheats. This ship has…

> This ship has sailed. Modern Anticheat platforms are kernel level.

so you use a kernel level anti-anti-cheat

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#100

Post by beeboobaa3 »

latexr wrote: post #24
beeboobaa3 wrote: post #12

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

Not every cookie requires consent. https://commission.europa.eu/resources-partners/europa-web-g... In this case, this one might fit: > User centric security cookies, used to detect authentication abuses and linked to the functionality explicitly requested by the user, for a limited persistent duration

It's clearly a tracking cookie.

> for a limited persistent duration

FTA:

> However, the VGUI browser had no issues saving cookies with expiry dates exceeding 10+ years!

So no, it doesn't even qualify.

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