[PointyFluff]

What if I use open source drivers? How are you going to do that? What business is it of yours that I might write my own? Or (more likely) patch my own? What about my HID drivers? Sensitive keystrokes?

Yeah, I just don't see games needing access to such kernel level items.

[invokestatic]

There’s nothing stopping you from using open source drivers, actually. Plenty of open-source projects like Dokan will typically run fine with an anti-cheat (ours will, certainly). What stops you from running a patched version is actually Windows itself, since Windows requires drivers to be signed with an authenticode codesigning certificate. Plenty of open-source projects and people have one, though. So it’s not an anti-cheat blocking you, it’s Windows itself. Of course, if you go out of your way to disable driver signature enforcement, most anti-cheats will prevent you from playing, but this is a mode strongly discouraged from Microsoft and does weaken your computer’s security.

[lmm]

If anti-cheat is the thing that cares about whether windows is running without driver signature enforcement then anti-cheat is the thing that's blocking me.

My own example: I have an xbox 360 dancemat, which is unusable with the official drivers (they map the arrows as axes, so treat left + right as nothing). So I have to use the open-source XBCD, which frankly I'd treat as more reputable and better code quality than most signed drivers. But since no-one's paying the $100+/year to sign it, it's not signed. And while I understand why Microsoft wants someone to have skin in the game before they issue a driver signing certificate, they really need to find a way to ensure that reputable, established open-source driver projects get signed if they want users to accept driver signing; I wouldn't even mind being stuck on an old "certified" version or something.

[invokestatic]

I sympathize with you and wish it was possible to support your situation and those similar situations like yours. It’s just disabling signature enforcement effectively removes a key security boundary between kernel and user space, something that that would just be too easy for cheats to exploit.

[kbenson]

> What business is it of yours that I might write my own?

If they're providing online servers for you to play on with other people, under the condition that you aren't cheating and they are responsible for stopping cheating for everyone, they very much do care and it is their business, if you want to use their servers.

Having custom drivers is how you get wallhacks or custom mouse control macros that eliminates some of the challenges imposed by the game (e.g. automatic recoil control).

For a single player game, I agree, who cares, but for online games that live and die by competitive play and stopping cheaters so people can enjoy it, there's only so many options of how to find cheaters and so much resources to put towards it, so you get stuff like this.