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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

The latest in FPS cheating (that I'm aware of, not like I'm super plugged into the underground) involves buying a second PC to run the cheats, a card for your main PC to grab a copy of memory over DMA, ship it off to the second PC, then joining the two video feeds together. Apparently you can also hook your mouse up to a connection where it will edit the data flowing from the mouse to give you better aim as well.

A lot of it is the same as any other sort of security stuff, but like, the tough part is that the adversary has access to the physical machine. In my understanding anyway, not a security expert.

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The "end-game" for cheating software is just a camera pointed at the monitor, or an HDMI splitter. Run the video feed through a not-invented-yet AI/ML model, and the model will control your character via valid USB keyboard/mouse inputs.

"Behavioral" anti-cheat will have to finally become a thing. As a game designer in 5-10 years, you won't be able to assume the operating system will be privy to any data which indicates cheating is happening.

I believe the right answer would be to cluster players by behavior signatures, leading to all the bots being in clusters with eachother. Then bots can mostly just play other bots. Over time you can merge known "human" clusters together so that different play styles get to play in the same matches. This also has the benefit of clustering "toxic" players together - both by chat content and in-game player behavior.

Right, what I'm describing is basically 90% of that setup, just copying memory rather than with a camera.

> leading to all the bots being in clusters with eachother.

Some games do this! The factors are different, but yeah.

You would only ever do all that if you had no clue what you are doing (and most don't). It's rather trivial to bypass modern kernel anticheats, especially with a hacked up KVM or custom hypervisor. So much of anti-cheat nowadays is based off of automated (delayed) detection and user reports that you can easily ragehack to the the top ranks without ban if you just use silentaim (aimbot that doesn't need to change your view angles) and common sense.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that a majority of players in the top ranks of most popular FPSs are cheaters or queue with cheaters. There's nothing quite like watching the enemy stare right at you through every wall across the map and then carelessly run in a straight line towards you. Even more concerning is how many streamers queue up with blatant cheaters and then use their connections with game moderators to manually ban other cheaters.

Security != DRM, i.e. 'anti-cheat'. Security is more about 'a malicious player can't RCE other players' than "cheaters can't access data which is sent to their PC anyway". One is a lot more tractable than the other.

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