Comment by matheusmoreira
19 hours ago
Never forget the risks of trusting game companies with this sort of access to your machine.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/fs-labs-flight-simulator-pas...
Company decides to "catch pirates" as though it was police. Ships a browser stealer to consumers and exfiltrates data via unencrypted channels.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1cibw9r/valorant...
https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/634974-...
Covertly screenshots your screen and sends the image to their servers.
https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...
https://twitter.com/TheWack0lian/status/779397840762245124
https://fuzzysecurity.com/tutorials/28.html
https://github.com/FuzzySecurity/Capcom-Rootkit
Yes, a literal privilege escalation as a service "anticheat" driver.
Trusting these companies is insane.
Every video game you install is untrusted proprietary software that assumes you are a potential cheater and criminal. They are pretty much guaranteed to act adversarially to you. Video games should be sandboxed and virtualized to the fullest possible extent so that they can access nothing on the real system and ideally not even be able to touch each other. We really don't need kernel level anticheat complaining about virtualization.
The privacy points in general are valid, but what irritates me is using this rationale against kernel mode anti cheats specifically.
You do not need kernel access to make spyware that takes screenshots. You do not need a privileged service to read the user’s browser history.
You can do all of this, completely unprivileged on Windows. People always seem to conflate kernel access with privacy which is completely false. It would in fact be much harder to do any of these things from kernel mode.
Kernel access is related to privacy though, and its the most well documented abuse of such things. Kernel level access can help obfuscate the fact that it'a happening. However, it is also useful for significantly worse, and given track records, must be assumed to be true. The problem is kernel level AC hasnt even solved the problem, so the entire thing is risky, uneccesary and unfit for purpose making an entierly unneccesary risk to force onto unsuspecting users. The average user does not understand the risks and is not made aware of them either.
There are far better ways to detect cheating, such as calculating statistics on performance and behaviour and simply binning players with those of similar competency. This way, if cheating gives god-like behaviour, you play with other godlike folks. No banning required. Detecting the thing cheating allows is much easier than detecting ways in which people gain that thing, it creates a single point of detection that is hard to avoid and can be done entierly server side, with multiple teirs how mucb server side calculation a given player consumes. Milling around in bronze levels? Why check? If you aren't performing so well that yoh can leave low ranks, perhaps we need cheats as a handicap, unless co sistently performing well out of distribution, at which point you catch smurfing as well.
point is focusing on detecting the thing people care about rather than one of the myriad of ways people may gain that unfair edge, is going to be easier and more robust while asking for less ergregious things of users.
Counter Strike is a pretty good example that the statistical analysis alone doesn't work at all...at least not now. Valve has been collecting data since at least 2017 for their VAC Live system and it still doesn't work well enough to prevent or decrease the amount of cheating. The model only gives a cooldown of 20 hours if it flags your gameplay as irregular, and that cooldown resets over time.
It usually takes months, if not years for cheaters to get banned, but it takes a couple of dollars for a cheater to get a new account and start cheating again. Every time Valve fine tunes their models, they end up accidentally banning more innocent players in the process, so nobody has trust in that system anyways. There's too many datapoints to handle in competitive games, and there is no way to set a threshold that doesn't end up hurting innocent people in the process.
>This way, if cheating gives god-like behaviour, you play with other godlike folks.
Anti-cheat is not used to "protect" bronze level games. FACEIT uses a kernel level anti cheat, and FACEIT is primarily used by the top 1% of CS2 players.
A lot of the "just do something else" crowd neglects to realize that anticheat is designed to protect the integrity of the game at the highest levels of play. If the methods you described were adequate, the best players wouldn't willingly install FACEIT - they would just stick with VAC which is user-level.
> kernel level AC hasnt even solved the problem
> There are far better ways to detect cheating, such as calculating statistics on performance
Ask any CS player how VAC’s statistical approach compares to Valorant’s Vanguard and you will stop asserting such foolishness
The problem with what you are saying is that cheaters are extremely determined and skilled, and so the cheating itself falls on a spectrum, as do the success of various anticheat approaches. There is absolutely no doubt that cheating still occurs with kernel level anticheats, so you’re right it didn’t “solve” the problem in the strictest sense. But as a skilled player in both games, only one of them is meaningfully playable while trusting your opponents aren’t cheating - it’s well over an order of magnitude in difference of frequency.
There is no need for irritation. I condemn all sorts of anticheating software. As far as I'm concerned, if the player wants to cheat he's just exercising his god given rights as the owner of the machine. The computer is ours, we can damn well edit any of its memory if we really want to. Attempts to stop it from happening are unacceptable affronts to our freedom as users.
Simply put, the game companies want to own our machines and tell us what we can or can't do. That's offensive. The machine is ours and we make the rules.
I single out kernel level anticheats because they are trying to defeat the very mitigations we're putting in place to deal with the exact problems you mentioned. Can't isolate games inside a fancy VFIO setup if you have kernel anticheat taking issue with your hypervisor.
> As far as I'm concerned, if the player wants to cheat he's just exercising his god given rights as the owner of the machine.
By this same logic: As far as I'm concerned, if the game developer only wants to allow players running anticheat to use their servers then they're just exercising their god given rights as the owner of the server.
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This take sucks. The anticheat software in this context is for competitive games. No one cares about people cheating in isolation in single player games. The anticheat is to stop 1 guy from ruining it for the 9 others he's playing with online.
You can argue about the methods used for anticheat, but your comment here is trying to defend the right to cheat in online games with other people. Just no.
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This is the most asinine take I've seen on the subject in a while.
You may think it's your "god-given right" to cheat in multiplayer games, but the overwhelming majority of rational people simply aren't going to play a game where every lobby is ruined by cheaters.
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Game compagny have to have those kernel anti cheat because MS never implemented proper isolation in the first place, if Windows was secured like an apple phone or a console there wouldn't be a need for it.
Anti cheat don't run on modern console, game dev knoes that the latest firmware on a console is secure enough so that the console can't be tempered.
Consoles and phones are "secure" because you don't own them. They aren't yours. They belong to the corporations. They're just generously allowing you to use the devices. And only in the ways they prescribe.
This is the exact sort of nonsense situation I want to prevent. We should own the computers, and the corporations should be forced to simply suck it up and deal with it. Cheating? It doesn't matter. Literal non-issue compared to the loss of our power and freedom.
It's just sad watching people sacrifice it all for video games. We were the owners of the machine but we gave it all up to play games. This is just hilarious, in a sad way.
who are you to judge what gamers should care about?
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Trusted computing isn't about security. Its about vendors not trusting you.
one of those secure consoles you talk about, Xbox, is running Windows as OS
And if we embraced instead of feared remote attestation and secure enclaves, the days of game companies having this level of access would come to an end.
That's arguably even worse. Remote attestation means you get banned from everything if you "tamper" with "your" computer.
Remote attestation is the ultimate surrender. It's not really your machine anymore. You don't have the keys to the machine. Even if you did, nobody would trust attestations made by those keys anyway. They would only trust Google's keys, Apple's keys. You? You need not apply.