And how's that gonna help you when cheaters can use an HDMI grabber and USB HID emulation? Lol
I don’t think any system will stop someone truly dedicated, but the general idea is that each thing that adds a little more friction to cheating makes it less likely that the average player will encounter a cheater.
There's also hardware aimbot/triggerbot that reads your video output then sends input to a device connected to your mouse.
Its not what your everyday cheater has in free to play games like cs or cod but there are games where it matters more if you're banned, and when cheat subscriptions can be $100-200 a month the hardware cost isn't much.
Anything that's plugged into the machine can be poked, prodded, and logged to a central database by anticheat software.
> the types of dongles used for this are likely detectable in some way by kernel-level anticheat, and computer vision based cheats probably work better when you can inject contrasting color textures into the game
If you've ever worked in broadcast or volunteered for conference, lecture or house of worship broadcasting, you'll know there's an entire industry of cheap undetectable HDCP-removing HDMI splitters and capture cards. It's an open secret that conference AV relies on shitty $10 chinese HDMI splitters to make HDCP "work".
Similarly, there's a countless number of devices that can present themselves as any other USB device. You can MitM e.g. a keyboard or controller and inject packets that are impossible to distinguish from the users' own inputs.
Some consoles only allow wireless controllers with encrypted protocols, but that can be circumvented too. Replacing the joysticks in controllers with hall-effect ones is a common mod. It's possible to attach another chip inbetween at this point to inject custom inputs.
You can use these injected inputs to e.g. compensate for recoil. But you can also run a simple classifier on the HDMI video to identify objects and players.
Now sure, an anti-cheat could use statistical analysis to measure how quickly a player reacts, which would allow detecting such cheats. At this point it won't matter whether you're using kernel, userland or server-side anticheat though, as they've all got the same information available to them.
I think it's not about "solving" cheating, so much as making it sufficiently annoying to maintain working cheats that fewer people try. Just as in cybersecurity, no individual security measure will "solve" hacking, but in concert they reduce the impact by making it more difficult: the "Swiss Cheese Method" / defense-in-depth.
Reading through game cheating boards, it seems many hardware devices have been detected over time. It's an arms race. Here's a discussion of how anticheat started to detect people using HID-emulating devices by forcing a disconnection event: https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/valorant/615373-vanguard-...
That's a hack which only works for some devices in some specific state. At that point you're playing whack-a-mole, and you'll always lose.
> I think it's not about "solving" cheating, so much as making it sufficiently annoying to maintain working cheats that fewer people try
Annoying? I don't think you understand the hacker mentality. Breaking anticheat or DRM tickles the same nerv as CTFs or puzzle games. What you consider "annoying" is an activity others do for fun.
It's fun to break a system that's intentionally trying to keep you out. That's why I reverse engineer proprietary, obfuscated file formats and protocols. Whether that's brother plotters, blackmagic's input devices (which also function as license dongles), apple video codecs (actually still WIP) or my landlord's wireless water meter so I can add homeassistant support for it.
When kernel-level anticheat became a thing, I actually built a custom hardware aimbot out of an HDMI capture card and a custom Sandisk wireless clone that I was working on at the time. I've only used it once or twice, as I'm not a competitive gamer and don't actually have any use for it. The entire fun was in breaking the system.
That's just sort of fundamental to society at some level though, we play whack a mole with all sorts of misbehavior until we reach some sort of acceptable equilibrium.
I totally get the hacker mentality, I have a fully disassembled HP printer under my desk with some bullshit DRM that I've been desperate to break for some time, but I think your last line is really the key: breaking the system is fun for a small portion of people who are able to do it, but it's their users/customers who will be annoyed when their accounts keep getting banned and they need to buy new hardware.
With my brother printers it turned out I could just remove the chips from the genuine toner cartridges, reset the counters, and hot glue them to the refurbished toner. Maybe that works for HP ink as well?