Comment by hparadiz
20 hours ago
The Linux kernel has eBPF now so if they wanted to start spying on everything you do they can just do it.
20 hours ago
The Linux kernel has eBPF now so if they wanted to start spying on everything you do they can just do it.
> The Linux kernel has eBPF now so if they wanted to start spying on everything you do they can just do it.
Sure, except that anyone can just compile a Linux kernel that doesn't allow that.
Anti-cheat systems on Windows work because Windows is hard(er) to tamper with.
Well yeah but then eBPF would not work and then the anti cheat could just show that it's not working and lock you out.
This isn't complicated.
Even the Crowdstrike falcon agent has switched to bpf because it lowers the risk that a kernel driver will brick downstream like what happened with windows that one time. I recently configured a corporate single sign on to simply not work if the bpf component was disabled.
Well but then attackers just compile a kernel with a rootkit that hides the hack and itself from the APIs of the BPF program, so it has to deal with that too or it's trivially bypassed.
Anticheat and antivirus are two similar but different games. It's very complicated.
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The interesting solution here is secure boot, only allow users to play from a set of trusted kernels.
I'd be less antianticheat if I could just select the handcuffs at boot time for the rare occasion where I need them.
Although even then I'd still have qualms about paying for the creation of something that might pave the path for hardware vendors to work with authoritarian governments to restrict users to approved kernel builds. The potential harms are just not in the same league as whatever problems it might solve for gamers.
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Yep, a plenty of prior art on how to implement the necessary attestations. Valve could totally ship their boxes with support for anticheat kernel-attestation.
Is it possible to do this in a relatively hardware-agnostic, but reliable manner? Probably not.
What do you mean? Ship computer with preinstalled Linux that you can't tamper? Sounds like Android. For ordinary computers, secure boot is fully configurable, so it won't work: I can disable it, I can install my own keys, etc. Any for any userspace way to check it I'll fool you, if I own the kernel.
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I wonder if you could use check-point and restore in userspace (https://criu.org/Main_Page) so that after the game boots and passes the checks on a valid system you can move it to an "invalid" system (where you have all the mods and all the tools to tamper with it).
I don't really care about games, but i do care about messing up people and companies that do such heinous crimes against humanity (kernel-level anti-cheat).
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You can switch out the kernel in the running Linux desktop.
Uh, you'd have to compile a Kernel that doesn't allow it while claiming it does ... And behaves as if it does - otherwise you'd just fail the check, no?
I feel like this is way overstated, it's not that easy to do, and could conceptually be done on windows too via hardware simulation/virtual machines. Both would require significant investments in development to pull of
Right, the very thing that works against AC on Linux also works for it. There are multiple layers (don't forget Wine/Proton) to inject a cheat, but those same layers could also be exploited to detect cheats (especially adding fingerprints over time and issuing massive ban-waves).
And then you have BasicallyHomeless on YouTube who is stimulating nerves and using actuators to "cheat." With the likes of the RP2040, even something like an aim-correcting mouse becomes completely cheap and trivial. There is a sweet-spot for AC and I feel like kernel-level might be a bit too far.
All it takes is going to cd usr src linux and running make menuconfig. Turning off a few build flags. Hitting save. And then running make to recompile. But that's like saying "well if I remove a fat32 support I can't use fat32". Yea it will lock you out showing you have it disabled. No big deal.
That would require that they actually make the effort to develop Linux support. The current "it just works" reality is that the games developers don't need to support running on Linux.