Comment by charcircuit
15 days ago
Exactly, which is why Microsoft should be writing the one writing the kernel code needed for ensuring integrity of games. Microsoft needs to develop ways to allow games to run in an isolated VM that is hardware protected from the main operating system and ensures strong hardware security so cheaters can not simply attach malicious devices to the PCI bus to DMA sensitive data.
> attach malicious devices to the PCI bus to DMA sensitive data
How do you do this in modern system with TPMs and IOMMU enabled?
Sadly not all Windows machines are able to use kernel DMA protection, so for those machines nothing will stop you.
The obvious next step is to disallow those elderly machines once a critical mass of users have modern-enough equipment. We're almost there.
You pretend to be a device with a driver not compatible with IOMMU
This is a good move, but why isn't the anti-cheat software just refusing to operate on systems with these devices attached?
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Flash custom firmware emulating some benign "donor card".
As an indie game developer, how do I get my game into this system and how do I debug it?
For this theoretical feature Windows would do it automatically for apps that would opt in.
For debugging you would either not have this feature or enabled, or you would build a custom build that included a debugger in the secure environment. If you needed to connect to production servers you could whitelist your account to be ignored by the anticheat since your server would know you are not playing with an official build.
If it's a simple flag in the executable file header, what stops a cheat program setting the same flag and getting into the sandbox?
Or a cheat program combining itself with the game executable, and setting the flag so other processes can't interrogate whether it contains a cheat.
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