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by NullPrefix 2420 days ago
You forgot sudo. IIRC Windows Steam asks for Admin rights.
4 comments

Not necessarily. [0]

Also, it is actually quite trivial bypassing UAC prompt in Windows. It simply gives a false sense of security.

Something as simple as SilentCleanup [1] still works to this day. This will bypass UAC with little effort.

Even worse, following that, it is also trivial to get NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM using Windows Management Instrumentation Event Subscription. [2]

I've done it as an exercise in Go out of all languages and it ended up fully undetected both on disk and during runtime.

So Windows simply provides a false sense of security. After all Microsoft themselves said [3]:

  One important thing to know is that UAC
  is not a security boundary. UAC helps people
  be more secure, but it is not a cure all.
  UAC helps most by being the prompt before
  software is installed.
[0] https://amonitoring.ru/article/steam_vuln_3/

[1] https://enigma0x3.net/2016/07/22/bypassing-uac-on-windows-10...

[2] https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1084/

[3] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/e7/2009/02/05/update-on-uac...

Multiplayer Windows games in general ship anti-cheating software implemented as kernel modules that are more invasive than even draconian DRM.
I've played several multiplayer games for Windows and I've only seen Fortnite do this.
Many "serious" multiplayer games will feature this. I mean VAC, EasyAntiCheat, BattlEye. They all have a kernel module component.
Uhm, sudo on a proprietary binary outside the repo? ...Yeah no thanks.
What difference does it make really. Running a program on linux as a regular user can access all of your files, record your screen, keylog you, grab your passwords from your browser, do basically anything. Run it with sudo and what more can it do? Mess up your grub config? If a malicious program was run as a regular user it could basically ruin everything you care about unless you happen to be sharing a computer with multiple people but even then it could just wait until you run something with sudo and keylog your password.
How could a unprivileged program keylog my sudo typings? (I am running Wayland)
What CPU are you running? Spectre mitigations enabled? Hyper Threading?
Greater issues with possible persistence, control over daemons and sockets, access to lots of files I don't let regular users have access to, etc.

Plus the other half which is the whole proprietary binary side of things. IMO, lack of transparency invites more bad behavior.

You are correct, it does.