Comment by armada651
5 months ago
> Besides, it's a cat and mouse game where the vendor is the mouse.
The goal of anti-cheat isn't to stop the world's most advanced cheaters. Those are already unstoppable because they now use Direct Memory Access over the PCI-E bus, so the cheats don't even run on the same computer anymore. However since those cheaters are few and far in-between they can be handled through player reports.
The goal is to stop the mediocre cheater who simply downloaded a known cheat from a cheating forum. If you don't stop those you'll get such a large wave of cheaters that you can't keep up with banning them quickly enough.
With the emergence of AI cheating, cheats don't even need access to memory anymore. The cheat can entirely run on mouse and screen peripherals and the computer will have totally no idea what's going on. The best you can do is behavior analysis. But it always comes with chance of misreports.
Direct Memory Access cheats will always perform better as they can reveal the location of an opponent before they're even visible on the screen.
Why are players who aren't on screen even in the client memory? The server shouldn't be sharing sensitive information.
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DMA hardware and cheats are getting more and more accessible. It's not just chosen few anymore
> Those are already unstoppable because they now use Direct Memory Access over the PCI-E bus, so the cheats don't even run on the same computer anymore.
Working on mostly server platforms, I had forgotten that IOMMU enablement (and, where relevant, enforcement) was not the default.
Consumer hardware and software is terrifying.
Not sure how that's relevant, unless you find it terrifying that owners of hardware have control over their hardware.
It's your IOMMU, you can do what you want with it. Maybe you need to write heaps of stuff to take advantage of it, but what's new there?
The only thing you're getting by saying "no IOMMU" is "I want any devices in my machine to be able to do anything, not just what I want them restricted to".
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In my world, we won't let a system boot with production credentials unless the IOMMU is enabled.
This is enforced by a greatly enriched TPM (and it's willingness to unwrap credentials). We have trust several layers of firmware and OS software, but the same mechanism allows us to ensure that known-bad versions of those aren't part of the stack that booted.
If I wanted secure games (and the market would tolerate it), I'd push for enforcement of something similar in the consumer space.
> they now use Direct Memory Access over the PCI-E bus
Do you have any good resources with keeping up with this kind of thing? Seems like a fun topic to learn about