Hacker News Reader

Comment by tapoxi | Hacker News Reader

Proton is neat for sure, but unfortunately modern anti-cheat solutions expect Windows and will not allow Linux clients to connect. There's also a few games that I expected to work but simply won't launch for me, like Elder Scrolls Online.

I'm a fan of the Linux desktop, but for me the easiest solution is to have a dedicated Linux PC (right now an XPS 13 Developer) and a Windows machine for playing video games. I don't have the patience to troubleshoot getting games to run or perform well anymore.

View on HN

From a very personal point of view, I'm happy with anti-cheats not working on linux. Some of them are flat out rootkits, see valorant's anti-cheat.

No kidding. After spending so much effort on verifying that the code I'm running comes from trusted sources and that I have a decently secure system, I can't help but feel dirty after allowing some sort of weird DRM/anti-cheat service that needs to phone home just so I'm able to play a game I loved from 5 or 6 years ago.

What's the issue with giving out kernel mode access? Almost everyone is gaming on single user systems anyways.

Doesn't giving kernel mode access mean that if the game developer's CI is hacked, an attacker could push full compromise exploits down the channel?

Aren't there some security benefits from trying to confine apps to user land?

Userland can run DoS attacks, it can mine crypto, it can run keyloggers, it can steal, encrypt, and delete your files, it can make your system not properly startup, it can replace sudo or other programs that ask for passwords with a custom version, it can steal whatever's on your clipboard, it can infect other operating systems (depends how they are mounted), and much more.

User land can also gain kernel access pretty trivially

Riot's Valorant rootkit is active from boot and actively monitors everything you run and will block things it doesn't like or doesn't recognize.

Most of the other kernel anticheat rootkits are more polite and don't run until a game starts them, at least.

In general having a bunch of random stuff from video games running with kernel permissions is spooky. You never know whether someone will find an exploit in one of them, or if it will cause performance, stability or data integrity problems.

> Riot's Valorant rootkit is active from boot and actively monitors everything you run and will block things it doesn't like or doesn't recognize.

Honestly, if I was responsible for building an anti-cheat system this is the way I'd go about it. Anything that can run that you don't know about (e.g. because it ran before you started) is a potential risk.

Cheaters now exploit boot loaders to side step this, funnily enough

If the price for not getting that crap installed on my system is a few triple A multiplayer games, then so be it.

Pretty much all of them are root kits. EAC, Battle Eye, Valorant Vanguard, Faceit AC, ESEA AC, Denuvo AC

Modern "anti-cheat" solutions are invasive rootkits. I have no interest in running that on my computer for that purpose. I wish they'd invest more in server side AI instead to handle this, but it's much easier for them to simply put more malware on the client side.

Some developers aren't even denying that it's nasty, but excuse it with "no one cares anyway" or "we already could snoop on you, so don't complain if we make it even worse" which is disgusting.

Example: https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-null-anti-...

not sure why you are downvoted. You speak the truth, and as usual get downvoted without a reply.

multiplayer game have the choices: a) ship game with malware/trojan to try to prevent cheats, or b) open up for cheats (even if client side only, like see trhu walls)

Most popular games chose option A (and still fail preventing both client side and remote hacks)

Another option is to develop server side AI that can detect some non human behavior or behavior patterns that are cheats. It's not full protection but for sure more appropriate than putting rootkits on the client side.

oh that can't backfire at all *sarcasm

here is another idea: proper ranking of player abilities! crazy right? something so simple should be a day-one feature right? that would put all the hackers together and they could even compete in their own hacking league... 100% of clients satisfied!

now think about game companies failing to put that single feature to work correctly, what changes do you think a AI that detect human behaviour have or working well in that space? :(

Or the server could hide the data from the client that the client shouldn't be able to act on until just before that data would be seen by the client. (obviously with a slight tolerance for sending a bit extra that clients might need if lag rubber-banding predicts it might be revealed)

That isn’t really enough... that wouldn’t stop aim bots, for example.

Cheats themselves are basically rootkits, and you can't beat a rootkit when you are running on top of it. Anti-cheat pretty much has to be like this.

Server side enforcement is not only heavy, but has much of the same problems as the client side. It's running on a layer even higher than the client side anti-cheat. How can you tell if someone is running an aimbot or just has good aim? Sure if they do something outright impossible you could ban them, but heuristic approaches are going to have problems with false positives as well as false negatives.

Server side doesn't violate user's system with rootkits. How to detect things with good level of correctness using server side AI is a good question. But it's a much better problem to solve than how to add even more privacy invasive malware on the user's system.

> How can you tell if someone is running an aimbot or just has good aim?

That's the point. I don't care. As long as the game is enjoyable. And I'm sure AI can be gradually trained to detect cheating in more sophisticated manner do differentiate non human from human patterns. Not a trivial issue, but something they should invest money in as above, instead of rootkits.

  14:22:01 *Shmerl has joined the game
  14:22:02 [DefinitelyNotAnAimbot] headshots Shmerl
  14:22:05 [AnotherTotallyHumanPlayer] headshots Shmerl
  14:22:07 [DefinitelyNotAnAimbot] headshots Shmerl
  14:22:07 DefinitelyNotAnAimbot is on a killing spree!
  14:22:10 *Shmerl has left the server

I already explained the idea above. Trade off of the server side AI detection is way better than client side rootkit idea. Neither is perfect, but the latter is outright disgusting and crooked.

This won't work very well for a free to play game.

My complaint is similar. There are a couple of games that I really wish I could play using proton. However, while I used to dual boot, now I don't even do that and I simply forego playing those games.

I have too many games in my library to worry about not being able to play a couple more, I guess. But, if I could, then I would. So I just stick with whatever can run with proton.

> Proton is neat for sure, but unfortunately modern anti-cheat solutions expect Windows and will not allow Linux clients to connect.

Keep in mind that many people are interested in single player or local multiplayer that do not require anti-cheat solutions. They will hardly ever run into problems on that front.

I suspect the largest problem with Proton is that support will be biased towards recent popular titles based upon common game engines. Replicating all of Windows is not practical, Valve themselves will be most keen on supporting games they can generate revenue from, and community contributions will come from people who have an interest in getting particular titles working as well as the technical skills to contribute.

Proton is in the works to support anti-cheat. Vital kernel support was recently merged. I don't know the details, only that it is a goal of proton and hopefully will work. Many games use the same anti-cheat so if everyone cooperates it could work out.

I give it 0% chance that Proton will support anti cheat. How does an anti cheat checking "fake" windows kernel structures in linux actually accomplish any anti cheat?

My solution for the anti-cheat problem is NVIDIA Geforce Now (via Chromium). Sure you will need a good internet connection, but at least you can simply start it right from your desktop without much hassle.

At least for now, Squad and BF4 are working flawlessly in Proton inc. anti-cheat for me.

Can’t say the same for many other anti-cheat games though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com