[tjohns]

But anti-cheat is largely obfuscation. Unless the host system is locked down (i.e. game consoles, systems with TPM-based verified boot), any state the game has access to is also going to be accessible to attackers.

You can limit what state the game itself has access to, but that's just one class of attack. It won't prevent aimbots, for instance.

It's the same reason why secure DRM is so hard. If the user has root, it's not a level playing playing field for developers.

[atesti]

Given the state of toolkits like OpenCV one might even imagine an aimbot which scans the HDMI output or a webcam picture taken from your screen and does aiming or grinding!

[sanlyx]

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...

[monocasa]

I mean, all HDCP is broken AFAIK.

[sthomas1618]

That's good point and their random debuggers are definitely a clever obfuscation technique. And also not trying to say encryption is a poor strategy. The larger point I'm trying to make is that its possible being so secret about anti-cheat is to the industry's disadvantage. Feels like there is an opportunity for many studios to collaborate on anti-cheat tools and techniques (perhaps with open-source). For example, is Riot Game's packer/unpacker a specific solution to their codebase or could it be abstracted and open-sourced? This is a industry-wide problem and studios should be competing for the most creative and fun games, not the best anti-cheat.