this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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Bitchy cheaters throwing a hissy that they can't keep creating an unfair advantage for themselves in an online environment. I hope their mothers take away their internet connection for the month.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattlEye
Fuck cheaters, but also FUCK kernel level shit, it's possible to make a good AC without fucking around in the kernel.
I don't even install third party Antivirus' that hook into the kernel because of all the issues it causes. 80% of all BSODs I've traced back have always had a root cause because of some shit piece of software fucking around in the kernel. 15% is shitty drivers.
Kernel AVs and ACs actually act like malware in of itself with the types of hooks and interactions it performs. Anything operating at the kernel level can basically see just about everything you or your computer is doing
Fuck kernel level AC
CrowdStrike has entered the chat.
They've been a boom to the cyber security industry though, even though it wasn't a virus and didn't really damage anything simply the fact that it happened has forced management to actually appreciate the importance of cyber security, and cyber integrity.
They are hiring like crazy now.
Now if only the United States could be convinced that remote working isn't the work of the devil, we might be in for a productive few decades in the technology space. No need for AI
What if the cheat runs in the kernel? I am also against these extremely invasive anti-cheat measures, but it must be clear to everyone that the cheat developers and users have no qualms about this.
A user level AC can do shit all against that if the cheat runs in ring 0.
A) They can actually invest in server-side detection
B) Cheats running at ring0 aren't invisible, unkillable maybe, but AC just needs to detect to ban/kick user
There's no excuse for kernel AC, it's just a cheap, lazy shortcut
Every rootkit ever disagrees with that statement.
I'm not deep enough in the topic to be able to judge this, but i would guess the needed extra hardware is simple not worth it. especially in games with many players or complex physics i would guess that could lead to considerable load on the servers.
Plus, server side is not able to catch things the client manipulates on his side. e.g. graphical data to make walls transparent. The server could at most catch the player abusing this knowledge, but if he is smart about it, the server has no way to ever notice.
Clarification, to the game client, the cheat has to interact with the actual game process at some point. Rootkits try to interact with other processes as little as possible until instructed otherwise
Nope, the servers are already beefed up to just handle the players and physics as-is, adding detection routines to determine "Hey, this player is flying 100s of feet in the air and there's no flying in this game" would be like a drop in the bucket
Do you realize how much cheating just some server-side checks would cut down? The most egregious ones are the ones people complain about, and hate, the most. The ones who instakill you or fling you far above the map or shoves you underground. The "smart ones" can be taken care of manually based on reports.
There will never ever be a 100% cheat proof game kernel AC or not. Nothing is unhackable.
It's all about doing it as cheaply as possible and offloading to a third party to handle so they can wash their hands
Probably a few Linux/Steam Deck players pissed that Rockstar just nuked their ability to play without warning or reason as well.
Those are legitimate victims, fuck the cheaters.
The cheaters have already found a way to bypass this stupid shit. It only affects legitimate users and cheaters too stupid to figure out the seemingly trivial workaround.
Eh, I was playing it on steam deck, GTA online was just not worth it with all the cheating anyway.
What I don't get is why they went with the most invasive kernel level stuff instead of doing even the most basic server side checks to check for users doing physically impossible stuff.
Man, that sounds familiar. I gave up on Escape from Tarkov for the same reason.
It's just ridiculous the stuff you see that should be easy to catch with basic server checks (even if you were to run them after the fact). Players conjuring money and vehicles out of thin air, moving impossibly fast, vehicles/players with seemingly unlimited hit points, etc. You could easily catch that shit on the server side and ban the cheaters, but instead they go for the most invasive client side shit.
Sure, if you want to stamp out stuff like aim bots and whatever eventually you'll need to look at the client side of things, but in a decade they didn't seem to do anything at all.
That kind of stuff catches legitimate users all the time. In Rust for example it's common to get kicked for "fly hacking" while jumping on vehicles. The more open-ended the game the more weird edge cases become very relevant. Especially if it has a halfway decent physics sim. Tons of ways to give players weird velocities. Then it has to account for the variance ping introduces...
Some stuff, yeah. Should be easy to check if a player has too much HP. But spoofed communication between the client and server is a tough nut to crack when you can only see what the client wants you to see. Keeping everything server-side would help but that introduces latency to every input, unacceptable for anything even moderately paced.
All thay said, it would be a lot easier to swallow the "necessary evil" argument if it actually fucking worked.
I'm pretty sure there's not a valid reason for players to be able to spawn giant Ferris wheels in people's garages, that seems like a fairly easy one to test for
Use a more holistic approach. Combine heuristics like the average speed and aim hit percentage with reports from other players.
Review player reports, if a player makes a false allegation in their reports, mark that player as having less reliable reports. If a player reports someone who turns out to be a definite cheater, mark whoever reported the cheater as having more reliable reports. Etc etc.
Like, if the report just says "player was moving fast outside a vehicle", maybe they were cheating, or maybe they were just goofing off trying to stand on top of vehicles the whole game. If the report says "player was moving fast the whole game, had the highest kill count, and was also reported by 5 other players in the match for cheating", it's a little more clear what's happening.
Server-side checks cost processing power and memory hence they need to spend more on servers.
Client side kernel-level anti-cheat only ever consumes resources and cause problems to the actual gamers, not directly to Rockstart's bottom line (and if it makes the game comms slightly slower on the client side it might even reduce server resource consumption).
If Rockstar's management theory is that gamers will endure just about any level of shit and keep on giving them money (a posture which, so far, has proven correct for just about every large game maker doing that kind of shit) then they will logically conclude that their bottom line won't even suffer indirectly from making life harder for their existing clients whilst it will most definitelly suffer if they have more server costs due to implementing server side checks for cheating.
Because it's cheaper than actually implementing working anti heat instead of just stealing control of your computer and leaving gaping vulnerabilities on it.
After all, why would they care? It's not their computer.
Linux users playing dirty? Not a good look.
I'm upset they nuked Linux support, my PC is Linux and have a steam deck
I'm still not going to fucking ddos them for it
Yeah that's shitty. I'd rather the cheaters ruin the game for a subsection of the populace rather than all of them though.
Heh, I would say the cheaters are generally much more immature and likely to DDOS. I think there is a lot of overlap over video game cheaters and script kiddies, especially when the cheaters are called hackers
Qnd cheaters have money (the same they use to buy cheats) to pay for botnets
Battleye is supported on steam deck
But honestly FUCK kernel level ACs
Battleye is, but they didn't enable it for Linux. Literally a switch, and they failed to do so.