Hacker News Reader

Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

I think it's good security practice to run/install your games under a different user than the one you use for banking. It's a hack, but it's all we can do with the dismal state of desktop OSes.

View on HN

Unfortunately, all it takes is something like Genshin Impact's anti-cheat system - which runs at the kernel / ring 0 level [1] - to be compromised, and then it's game over anyways.

Not to mention the potential of "what if the anti-cheat is deliberately programmed to be malicious?". A dismal state all around.

[1] https://genshin.hoyoverse.com/en/news/detail/103720

Brings an entirely different element of "fun" to every Tencent game.

With the companies that don't care about security but require their bugware in ring0? With whole-system memory scans, exfiltration and executing code right off network?

I've for a long time kept my gaming PC in physically separate network. While I've relaxed that for practical reasons, can't imagine ever logging into anything I can't trivially burn or recover into a gaming machine.

VMs are normally a better solution for isolation, although with games it's probably better to let them run on the hardware while the sensitive stuff gets its own VMs.

The problem with VMs is games that require anti-cheat, which from what I've read from user experiences try to detect and prevent VM usage (not sure about Valve's anti-cheat though).

I've been playing only in a VM with GPU passthrough for years now and the online game which made problems was Darktide, but they pushed a fix soon after release to actually allow VMs. I've heard the same from friends using a similar setup.

Still anecdotal, I know, but it seems to be a rather small issue.

The common ones such as EAC, BattlEye and VAC don't prevent you from running the corresponding games in a VM.

Hmm, as I've seen topics like this[1] for EAC, though a comment from a different result[2] mentions EAC can be configured to optionally block VMs so maybe it varies by game.

> Today, I purchased and installed Dead by Daylight with the intention of playing with some friends, only to start the game and find a message from Easy Anti-Cheat stating that the game "cannot run under a virtual machine."

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/100yqok/bypass_eac_ca...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/blackdesertonline/comments/px0flc/v...

You are right. I've heard similar stories about BattlEye in the past which I assumed might just have been a decision they've reverted since but could've very well been an option up to game devs to enable. Thankfully not many of them do seemingly.

If the VM operates under the same privileges than a host, all this does is prevent automated attacks - a savvy attacker can still access the disk image of the guest, in some cases, it might actually be more vulnerable (as disk image access is implicitly a privesc in the context of the VM).

Don't do banking on your gaming PC

I do all my banking on my iphone. No way I would do banking on a desktop.

What does banking mean here? Managing bank accounts online in your browser

Reply on news.ycombinator.com