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by Rohansi
19 days ago
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Riot Games relaxed the requirements of their Vanguard anticheat by requiring TPM attestation among other things [1]. > It's also the solution to yesterday's problem because cheaters are now using cheat hardware that acts as a user input device Cheats like these are not as devastating to the game as the ones that read or manipulate memory in the game process itself. You can't see people through walls with cheat hardware acting as a user input device (IOMMU should prevent DMA cheats but those aren't user input devices). [1] https://xcancel.com/riotgames/status/2069829543276216564 |
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Only on Windows, and then we're back to the thing being a net negative for the consumer again. Also not proven that it's actually effective, in which case we get the cost without the benefit.
> Cheats like these are not as devastating to the game as the ones that read or manipulate memory in the game process itself.
It allows aimbots and the like which are the most common form of cheating and more than enough to destroy the game for other players.
> You can't see people through walls with cheat hardware acting as a user input device (IOMMU should prevent DMA cheats but those aren't user input devices).
For which they can use different cheat hardware.
It's unclear how IOMMU is supposed to prevent this since many hardware devices actually need to access the relevant memory locations, e.g. your drive is going to write directly to the game's memory because that's how the game's code/data gets into memory to begin with or gets reloaded after being evicted when the user doesn't have unlimited RAM.
On top of that, the cheat hardware could attach to the memory slots. Consumer PCs often don't support memory encryption and it wouldn't work for this anyway, since memory encryption is meant for cold boot attacks or similar rather than live analysis/modification. The performance requirements of RAM require block modes like XTS which allow replay attacks (undo cheats) and data flow analysis. Or worse, they just use a replay attack to get ACE on the device that passes attestation.
Attempting to secure a device in the physical possession of the attacker is very challenging and in general should not be the basis of anything you intend to actually be secure.