[mitkebes]

I also always hear a lot of people complain about cheaters in Valorant, so all of that compromised personal security doesn't actually stop cheaters.

Honestly I feel like you should only use kernel anticheat on a dedicated machine that's kept 100% separate from any of your personal data. That's a lot to ask of people, but you really shouldn't have anything you don't consider public data on the same hardware.

[pxc]

> you should only use kernel anticheat on a dedicated machine that's kept 100% separate from any of your personal data.

Correct. Unfortunately, what you've just described is a gaming console rather than a PC. This problem fundamentally undermines the appeal of PC gaming in a significant way, imo.

[thewebguyd]

> This problem fundamentally undermines the appeal of PC gaming in a significant way, imo.

Yes, game publishers are trying to turn PCs into a gaming console, which IMO will always be a futile effort, and is quite frankly annoying. I don't game on PC to have a locked down console-like experience.

Just embrace the PC for what it is and stop trying to turn it into a trusted execution platform with spyware and rootkits.

Look at BF6 - for all the secure boot and TPM required anti-cheat they stuffed it with, there were cheaters day 1, so why abuse your users when it's clearly ineffective anyway.

[ryandrake]

That's what gets me! If these rootkit anti-cheat systems actually stopped cheating then maybe, just maybe, I'd accept them as a necessary evil. But every game that has these things... still has cheaters! So as a user, you're consenting to ripping a security hole through your system, and in return you are still playing games with cheaters.

The game companies keep saying these things are necessary, yet they don't fully do the very thing they claim to do on the label.

[Propelloni]

I can't put a finger on it but that tastes like the copyright/DRM situation in reverse.

[balamatom]

Not even in reverse, this is literally DRM.

Can't help but ask myself sometimes... why would users want to pay in the first place, for the content of someone who invests more money and leverage that some people see in their entire lives, in delivering user-hostile technical countermeasures that most of the time are ultimately futile?

What is the so valuable thing that one is supposed to get out of the work of someone who treats their audience this way, awesomely as their stuff might've been made? That's what doesn't make the most sense to me. But then I remember how most people aren't very intentional about most of their preferences and will accept whatever as long as it's served by an unaccountable industry into everyone's lives at the same time in a predictable manner, and I despair.

[tuhriel]

Funnily enough, there is also the exact opposite discurse in the US regarding firearms; where one side says: that firearms need to somehow be restricted and and it needs more checks to buy a gun. But then the Industry tells the story that in that case only the 'good guys' get restricted, since the 'bad guys' don't really follow the law anyways.

Where with Anti-cheat and DRM only the 'good guys' get hit, since the 'bad guys' don't follow "the law" anyways.

[xg15]

Yeah. Anticheat systems are the "think of the children" of DRM. It's the one scenario where you can sell users the hostile takeover of their own computer as actually beneficial for them - because cheaters in multiplayer are a genuine annoyance - while ignoring anything else.

Of course the argument falls flat on multiple levels: It ignores other ways to prevent cheaters, like server-side detection or maybe developing a gameplay that is not based on channeling masses of anonymous strangers through the game world. It ignores that it doesn't actually solve the problem of cheaters. And it ignores that many games use anticheat for reasons that don't have to do with multiplayer at all, e.g. to keep players from bypassing in-game purchases.

[frollogaston]

How are the cheaters getting around it?

[quantummagic]

Some use dedicated custom hardware, or a second PC, like this:

https://www.dma-cheats.com/

[yonatan8070]

The amount of effort, time, and money people put into cheating is honestly insane.

A 14 year old who installs an autoclicker to mess with friends or randoms online I can get. But there are fully grown adults who dedicate their time and substantial amounts of money (whole second computer) just to win in online video games?

What's the motivation/justification for spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on cheating hardware and software? Are these just super-rich people who have more money than sense?

[technothrasher]

I haven't paid much attention to any of it, as I don't really like multiplayer games anyway, but I always just assumed many people figure out how to cheat simply as a meta-game. I mean, how can you ask what the motivation to cheat is without asking what the motivation to even play the game in the first place is? Barring professional competition, both playing and cheating are largely meaningless activities outside the simple enjoyment.

[RugnirViking]

A bit of both. Some very clever people, often in Russia or Philippines or Venezuela etc where incomes and legal risks are low make the cheats, and sell them to idiots in the west.

[quantummagic]

> What's the motivation/justification...

No doubt there are various reasons, some more understandable than others. There are some fascinating historical cases, like the one explored in "The King of Kong" :

https://youtu.be/_4v15X8Px34

Which is well worth a watch, if you're curious.

[swagmoney1606]

You don't neeed DMA hardware btw. Just find a signed driver that's vulnerable to run whatever you want... Also, not hard at all. I guarantee you have a driver you could re-purpose on your windows machine right now.

[snickerdoodle12]

do you not have any hobbies? cheat development is insanely fun

[pityJuke]

Honestly, if consoles were willing to accept KB+M (and gyro aiming for that matter), I’d be completely proposing that competitive live service titles mostly abandon PC, except for a small “probably infested with cheaters” base.

[EgregiousCube]

It’s happening! https://www.dualshockers.com/battlefield-6-will-support-keyb...

[seabrookmx]

XBox consoles do in fact support KB+M, though not all games support it.

[pityJuke]

a) are they now supporting any KB+M peripheral?

b) should’ve specified this is the bigger problem. glad to see from the other comment bf6 is coming on-board, but VALORANT doesn’t and that’s probably the quintessential title for this.

[ychompinator]

Stream console output to pc, use AI to detect enemies, manipulate mouse and keyboard input to aimbot, even consoles aren’t safe

[msgodel]

Somehow Xonotic manages to be both completely free/open software and not have cheating problems like this. It's never been clear to me how they've done that although client-side stuff like these kernel anti-cheat things were obviously never going to work.

[sodality2]

Combination of niche/low user base, community servers encouraging user-based enforcement of norms, and the lack of a unified ranking system. People don't cheat if it doesn't psychologically reward them. (at least en masse)

[Scramblejams]

> doesn't actually stop cheaters.

doesn't actually stop all cheaters.

We could have a better discussion around this if we recognize that failing to stop 100% of something isn't a prerequisite to rigorously evaluating the tradeoffs.

[trehalose]

Doesn't actually stop all cheat developers. If even one person develops and sells a cheat that the kernel-level anticheat doesn't catch, then it stops 0% of cheaters from buying and using the cheat.

[Levitating]

It's much harder to sell a cheat that requires the user to significantly alter their computers boot process. Anti-cheat just exists to inconvenience cheaters enough so that the cheats lose their value.

[pharrington]

It makes the cheats more valuable on the black market. I'm fairly sure the only people cheating in the major competitive games with anticheat are whales and extremely unethical pro players.

[baby_souffle]

If that's the case then why not only have kernel level anti-cheat enforced for the leagues and the tournaments?

[charcircuit]

Because then a lot more people would cheat outside of leagues and tournaments.

[Mindwipe]

That's not really true if the exploit requires soldering on to RAM pins and executing on a second, independent machine.

[gellybeans]

I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that it's one-sided. Essentially you are saying "Just trust me bro" on behalf of a self-evaluating company.

I'd argue the potential for abuse is a perfectly reasonable discussion to have, and doesn't have much bearing on the effectiveness of anticheat, but I understand that's not the point you are trying to make.

[Scramblejams]

Sorry, my writing should have been clearer, I put one too many negatives in. :-)

I didn't claim we should trust the company. Whether we can trust the anticheat maker is certainly part of the rigorous evaluation of the tradeoffs I mentioned. My point was that saying "it doesn't stop cheaters" is both incorrect and stifling to a more productive conversation, because it implies anticheat has no value and is therefore worth no risk.

As for me, if Gabe said "now you can opt your Steam Deck in to a trusted kernel we ship with anticheat and play PUBG," I'd probably do it. But that's because I, for better or worse, tend to trust Gabe. If Tencent were shipping it, I'd probably feel differently.

[YokoZar]

Compare: "I still get spam, therefore all these anti-spam measures are worthless"

It is absolutely the case that there would be more cheating if we turned off the only partially effective systems. We know this because they are regularly stopping and banning people!

[Mindwipe]

People are going to to be upset when it happens but it is absolutely inevitable at some point Steam ships a Steam Deck with hardware based attestation of the OS being a signed version of SteamOS, feeding back to a Steam API, that can be used as the basis of an anti-cheat solution.

[Scramblejams]

And if Valve lets me run that same kernel on my Linux desktop PC, where most of my gaming happens, I'll be tempted to run it there too.

[pfooti]

A dedicated machine with no other general purpose apps that has minimal private data on it sounds like a gaming console.

[wakawaka28]

Or a virtual machine...

[superb_dev]

And with PCIe pass through you can get near bare metal performance. You won’t be able to play Valorant though

[Gigachad]

Anti cheat won't run in a VM

[dylan604]

Flip it. Run the games on bare metal with nothing on it but games and a VM. use the VM for your personal system.

[Hackbraten]

That achieves nothing. A hypervisor can see and manipulate any VM it runs. By extension, a compromised kernel can do the same.

[charcircuit]

On Android this isn't true with support for protected virtual machines.

[QuaternionsBhop]

How about with homomorphic encryption?

[beeflet]

Not with that attitude!

[wakawaka28]

Why not?

[Gigachad]

Because anti cheat want's to verify that the highest levels of the system are not being tampered with. When contained within a VM it's impossible to tell if some cheating script on the host OS is reading or tampering with the game memory.

Probably the only workable solution is for windows to provide some kind of secure game mode where the game and only the game runs and can have windows attest nothing else is running. But that anti cheat has no access to the data in the real work OS which is currently not running. Ruins multi tasking, but assuming you can switch over fast enough it might not be too bad.

[thayne]

How does it know it is in a VM? Couldn't the host system make it look enough like real hardware, possibly with hardware passthroughs that the AC can't tell it is a VM?

[kaladin-jasnah]

I've read that they specifically look for this by finding RDTSC timestamps, which would include (?) the overhead of the hypercall or something.

[dandersch]

It can work on a vm, but for Valorant specifically it seems that detecting a vm triggers the anticheat and gets you banned. I believe this is the case for most anticheats except VAC. You can try to evade the detection, but then you just enter the same cat & mouse game as a cheater. Whether allowing/disallowing VMs actually cuts down on cheaters? I don't know.

[sounds]

About halfway in the article, there's a brief nod to CS:GO. It uses a tick system and the server controls what is possible, such as physics or awarding kills. Fighting genre games use the same server-based game logic.

Cheating is a big draw to Windows for semi-pro gamers and mid streamers. What else is there to do except grind? Windows gives the illusion of "kernel level anti-cheat," which filters out the simplest ones, and fools most people some of the time.

[chowells]

Fighting games do not use server-mediated simulation, in general. Cheating is actually a huge problem in popular games. And in fact, even running a server-mediated simulation wouldn't help with any of the common cheating in fighting games.

For instance, a common cheat in Street Fighter 6 is to trigger a drive impact in response to the startup of a move that is unsafe to a drive impact. That is recognizing the opponent's animation and triggering an input. There's no part of that which cares where the game simulation is being done. In fact, this kind of cheating can only be detected statistically. And the cheats have tools to combat that by adding random triggering chances and delays. It's pretty easy to tune a cheat to be approximately as effective as a high-level player.

Kernel-level anticheat isn't a perfect solution, but there are people asking for it. It would make cheating a lot harder, at least.

[ben-schaaf]

> About halfway in the article, there's a brief nod to CS:GO. It uses a tick system and the server controls what is possible,

As does Valorant and virtually every other first person shooter. The cheats aren't people flying around or nocliping, it's wallhacks and aim assists/bots.

[JoshTriplett]

Wallhacks depend on the server giving the client information the client shouldn't have.

[joha4270]

You will find that competitive games already attempt's this, but it's impossible to eliminate entirely.

I can move and reveal what's behind a corner a lot faster than a network roundtrip, so either the server needs to give some advance warning or you're going to see enemies pop into existence suddenly.

And computing if somebody is almost visible isn't trivial either. Level geometry can have narrow openings such as holes in a wall. Or what if somebody jumps?

And that's before getting into non visual information. It's not perfect, but you could still add a significant advantage by drawing the exact location of footsteps.

So yeah, (some) games try, but network latency means the client needs some information a wallhack can use, and the alternative: being killed by an enemy that was invisible is at least as frustrating as being killed by a cheater so the visibility estimate has to be generous.

[ben-schaaf]

Additionally these games usually have dynamic shadows, and some even fully dynamic lighting. Good luck predicting where those could end up within a network round trip.

[sounds]

Admittedly, Valorant still has a cheating problem. But cheating is already less successful due to server side sim. Next gen games will have improved cheat detection, eventually leading to cheating drying up.

[asabla]

I fundamentally agree with you.

But anti-cheat hasn't been about blocking every possible way of cheating for some time now. It's been about making it as in convenient as possible, thus reducing the amount of cheaters.

Is the current fad of using kernel level anti-cheats what we want? hell nah.

The responsibility of keeping a multi-player session clean of cheaters, was previously shared between the developers and server owners. While today this responsibility has fallen mostly on developers (or rather game studios) since they want to own the whole experience.

[tzs]

> Honestly I feel like you should only use kernel anticheat on a dedicated machine that's kept 100% separate from any of your personal data. That's a lot to ask of people, but you really shouldn't have anything you don't consider public data on the same hardware.

Wouldn't it be sufficient to simply have a minimal system installed on a separate partition or on a separate drive (internal or external). Boot that for gaming, and never give it the password for the encryption of your non-gaming volumes.

[torginus]

This is why (even though everybody hates my for saying this) - the only way to do security is by enforcing root of trust - which is why Windows 11 forcing secure boot and TPM is a necessary change.

The idea that we should allow arbitrary code execution at some point, then we claw back security by running mass surveillance on your PC is clearly insane.

The only way to go forward is what BF6 has done - ensure the PC is in a pristine state, and nothing bad was loaded in the kernel - which is ironically why their anticheats conflicted - they don't allow loading random crap in the kernel.

Not to mention, people who develop these invasive security modules don't have the expertise, resources or testing culture to muck about in the kernel to the degree they do.

As to how dangerous this actually got actually showcased by Crowdstrike last year.

[safety1st]

Sounds great! Guess who I trust? Me. The root of trust should be a key I generate. I do not trust this to any government, any private company or really any 3rd party, except perhaps a member of my family or my lawyer. It can just be me and maybe someone I grant a digital equivalent of power of attorney to. For a company like Microsoft to try and get involved is in my view a form of aggression.

[torginus]

I hope you run a globally recognized certificate authorithy then...

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Why not dual boot, and keep your files on an encrypted partition?

[y7]

> Honestly I feel like you should only use kernel anticheat on a dedicated machine that's kept 100% separate from any of your personal data. That's a lot to ask of people, but you really shouldn't have anything you don't consider public data on the same hardware.

Yes, and at that point, you may as well use Windows for that machine.