This article seems to be making all of the worst things about anti-cheat (kernel modules, mandatory Secure Boot/TPM, etc.) seem like good things. Why?
Only thing I can think of is Microsoft locking down Windows so hard that nothing outside of code written (well signed) by Microsoft can run with kernel level privileges but I think that is an even worse option.
If you don't like it you can always just go and play any of the titles without kernel level anti-cheat and get a cheater in ~1/5th of your games (my experience in counter strike).
I'd rather just give Riot Games my driver's licence than full access to my computer. They already know my name and where I live from metadata.
There should be a KYC solution for gaming where a company like Epic, Riot, or Valve verifies your identity and developers can gate competitive video games behind that. If you cheat, you're out for 5-10 years (so dumb teenagers aren't locked out forever). The big issue imo isn't banning cheaters, it's preventing them from creating a new account and cheating again.
Such a system would be free money & low maintenance for whatever company develops it first.
Though they do also use it for stuff like under 16 year olds not being able to play online games between midnight and 6am.
edit: Some extra details about this from a few months ago https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617
> KR (Korea) requires national identity numbers for gaming, which opens up a convenient opportunity to ban cheaters at the “soul” level. It is remarkably effective at keeping them out of game for longer periods of time—cheaters have to buy whole new identities to keep playing, so the bans really stick.
At the end of the day the goal isn't 0 cheaters but having few enough that the chance of your match being ruined by one is 1 or 2% instead of 10 or 20%
Acquire my identity in the same way you would if I was seeking approval for a new checking account or loan. I'd be perfectly happy to see the bar raised a few inches off the ground. The current state of competitive video games is really bad.
Maybe let people opt-in to photo ID verification if they want a one-time free account.
> “You have to humanize [the cheat] to a degree where the advantage is imperceptible from what a human can do,” said Koskinas. “And once you’re there, you’re not really cheating enough to make it worth it for most users.”
But if you read the article they do have some way to detect (some) DMA based hacks too where the actual cheat runs on a different computer and use DMA through a pci-express card to read/write directly into memory.
> “I think we detect the majority of it today, but it’s kind of iterative,” said Koskinas.
Though most cheaters "rage cheating" after losing really badly and using cheats to "get back" and those are much easier to detects. This kind of "download random cheat from the internet" at the best only get you banned and at worst your computer is super duper hacked (you are effectively manually downloading a virus and manually giving it admin/kernel level access)
> Thanks to all these techniques and strategies, most cheaters can now be roughly divided into two categories. The first, representing the majority of cheaters, is made up by those who are “rage cheating” by using cheap tools that are easy to detect. Riot employees sarcastically call these cheats “download-a-ban,” according to Koskinas.
At the end of the day all I know from my own experience is that the difference in the amount of cheaters I run into between Counter Strike and Valorant is massive and the main claimed difference being kernel level stuff in Valorants anti cheat (or Valve is just really really bad at making anti cheats)
Someone figured it out and used my account to cheat in counter strike. Valve banned the account one week (!!) later. Now the account can not be used to play their competitive games anymore. Needlessly to say it was a lifetime ban.
To this day I keep wondering how they can fk this up so bad. Why I am even allowed to play CS without 2fa enabled and without Email confirmation for the first login? They also failed to block the login from Thailand despite it's creation in Germany. This could have been so easily prevented.
Not sure if they fixed this yet. Otherwise you have your answer, why there so many more cheaters. It is not just the kernel extension. The most basics are not in place.
This is because any barrier to playing the game is also effectively a barrier for someone to buying their lootbox crap.
CS2 is entirely unplayable now due to hackers. I’m told Valorant isn’t much better. There’s probably just no solution unless you design your game to not benefit from hacking (e.g. Hearthstone, MTG)
Though as I understand the amount of cheaters in both games varies based on how high/low in the ranked rating you are.
Besides, sowing discontent is a tried and true propaganda strategy.
The question is: who coughs up the money for developing these cheats? Some of these, particularly the PCIe hardware rootkits, take a lot of money, time and skilled people to develop - and it is not too far fetched to assume that a nation state has been of assistance here.
Others openly flout their allegiance to Russia like the MIG-Switch developers, a ton of "bulletproof hosters" use Russian ASNs and/or are based in Russia, malware automatically disables itself when it detects indications of being in Russia... I can explain the latter away as "don't shit where you eat", but the others? There's no way there aren't direct links between the Russian government and the criminal actors. At the very least there must be some sort of "tacit approval".
Government officials and security researchers play videogames too, after all… sure, we’d hope they’d have good computer self defense. But it is a fishing expedition and all that.
Now is a kerbal level anti-cheat overkill? Hard to say from the outside but it does seem like installing a steel vault for your door. While the window is still right there as normal.
i was simply explaining that these studios don't need perfect security to accomplish their missions.
Cheaters currently use entirely second PCs, or other extremely complicated methods of cheating, and are still getting caught.
Security isn't "for nothing", you make it as expensive as possible for cheaters/adversaries to win, and then keep raising the bar, to make the majority of users safe and secure.
What even makes you think it's a solvable problem? Even with a totally cryptographically controlled end-to-end hardware chain that treats the player like an adversary/inmate (like in the consoles, maybe even more strict) there's always a possibility of ML-based cheats with a low-latency camera. Barely anyone does that now because there are easier methods, but trust me, it will get used if required, just like DMA is used now. People already throw crazy money into cheating.
It's a race to the bottom where everybody eventually loses except the corporations. Players never get rid of the cheaters completely, unrelated people who don't play games get their hardware+software locked down because of a bunch of whiny gamers, and corpos obtain the ultimate vendor lock.
The optimal amount of bad behavior is not zero.
Making it hard enough is good enough. The difference in 1% of games having a cheater and 5 or 10% is massive in the player experience.
If the locks treated me, the legitimate owner, as a criminal and required the kind of low-level access that software that runs at the kernel level gets, and still didn't work, then maybe.
The solution is not to make the lock so hard that it inconveniences you, the user, it is to shoot intruder on sight (aka better moderation).
> The optimal amount of bad behavior is not zero.
Obviously the goal never has been to have 0 cheaters. Just from the detection side you need to delay the bans, let in some of the previously detected cheats again, etc to keep the cat and mouse game going on (make it harder to A/B test your cheats)
https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617
> Worse still, is that we actually have to let them back in. When we outright “block” a cheating method, we are technically providing the cheater an instantaneous surface to iterate against, allowing them to A/B test their cheats until they find something that is actually undetected at that layer.
> unrelated people who don't play games get their hardware+software locked down because of a bunch of whiny gamers
If you think it is an issue then don't play their game. Very few companies are willing to go through the effort as it is actually quite a lot of work just from the security vulnerability aspects alone (and you also have to effectively detect the cheats too)
>If you think it is an issue then don't play their game.
This is a hypothetical example which would affect everyone regardless of playing any games. Not an existing thing, thankfully.
(although I wouldn't be surprised if the pressure will eventually be enough to make this happen. The fact that you can't fix a rotten culture with authoritarian measures without affecting everyone else never stopped anyone)
Here is some graphs for Valorant https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617 basically reaching ~10% at its worst (when Riot devs are only xmas holidays) and around ~1% at its best (~now). And this is the number of caught cheaters so actual amount of cheaters is probably slightly higher.
Here is someone doing a "study" in counter strike https://old.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1bnhikf/th...
> Out of 60 games, I had 28 games with spinbotters. 28 is an absolutely insane number. 17 games had the spinbotter on the enemy team, 11 games had the spinbotter on my team. Keep in mind though, some games had more than 1 spinbotter, bringing the total number to 36 spinners in 60 games.
(spinbot is a form of aimbot that is very obvious)
It's not nice, I don't like running a kernel mode anti-cheat any more than you do, but I can see why it's necessary for preserving the competitive integrity of free-to-play shooter games like Valorant.
Also the amount of people willing to buy another pc and DMA cards is way smaller making the chance of running into cheater in your match smaller.
Computer vision based cheats are also rapidly on the rise. You don't get wall hacks but you do top 1% reaction times and perfect tracking.
Makes me glad I prefer mostly single player content and never tolerate this stuff on my PC. If I gotta be locked down I'll just pick up a console.
I am not expert, but I think it's not necessarily the case?
Cheating is really a plague right now, and the only way to mitigate it is using kernel anti cheat.
If your solution is bad, it doesn't deserve to work. Find something else.
> “You have to humanize [the cheat] to a degree where the advantage is imperceptible from what a human can do,” said Koskinas. “And once you’re there, you’re not really cheating enough to make it worth it for most users.”
But it is something they acknowledge will be an issue at some point in the future. Personally I think for now AI is way too slow as all the computation needs to happen in a few milliseconds to really be effective.
> Koskinas says he often worries about the use of AI for screen classification, to learn what human inputs look like, and how to reproduce them.
https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617
> “Behavior” refers to an ML suspension (also called “server-sided” anti-cheat), often given to ragehackers.
But then you can just teach an AI to act like a human. Anti cheats in computer games is and always will be a cat and mouse game and AI/ML is just another tool in the bag of many tools (most bans seem to be fingerprinting based basically rebanning previous offenders who failed to get around the fingerprinting system)