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Comment on Kernel Anti-Cheat Is an Overreach

There are zero reasons

There is a reason. The idea is that an anticheat probably have higher rights than the regular user and therefore would be undetectable by an anticheat system with regular rights. Doing it in Kernel mode means it has the highest power to detect even admin level cheats. That is the reason. Many anticheat systems are completely useless without Kernel mode, at least according to the devs (I don’t have numbers to compare them with or without Kernel mode, nobody has probably). So they don’t even bother if they cannot access the Kernel.

Now I agree with you a videogame shouldn’t have this much power over my system. And it doesn’t even catch them all. But stating it has no reason whatsoever is wrong. I do not want shady companies like Riot to do whatever they want on my system.

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pory@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
This is why I hope that cheats end up being MITM attacks with ai slop in control. LLMs can easily do basic pattern recognition, so a device that can “look” at the screen for you and click on people’s heads would be trivial to produce with no software running on the actual game device. Get that popularized and the only excuse for rootkit anti-cheat evaporates. I’d rather live in the world where people cheat at video games than the world where the average gamer has 5 rootkits on their system just to protect “competitive integrity”.

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- Dremor@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  That’s actually what hardware cheaters do (no need for the LLM part). They got a second computer, reading the screen, and a “MITM” device between the controller and the computer running the game to auto-aim.
  
  No level of kernel anticheat can beat that.
  
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  - bountygiver@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    ya there’s a video about someone making a valorant cheat that just reads the pixels around the crosshair and knows when to shoot when you cross any enemy outline, to the computer it’s just a USB display output + mouse
    
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  - pory@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Right, now get it “generally doable” on a device with phone level specs and universality (plus a three cent cable) and watch online competitive gaming crash to the point where there’s genuinely no rational argument for installing spyware.
    
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    Dremor@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    They are talking about securing the inputs by basically adding tls beween the two of them, in order to make mitm a lot harder. A little bit more input lag, probably, but at least it will help defend agains prisoned USB devices.
    
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  - thingsiplay@lemmy.ml ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Right, but it was never claimed to be. Running hardware cheats is extremely costly, compared to simple software cheats. I don’t have the numbers, but we can assume that most cheats are software cheats. And if we could at least (on paper, I know they don’t and never will) eliminate those its already a huge win. No anti cheat will or is even about to block all cheats and cheaters. Its only about to have less of them to a degree of integrity of fun for most players.
    
    It’s a similar calculation the developers and publisher make to block piracy as much as they can, knowing that they won’t block everyone. And I want to stress that I am not in favor of anticheats with the ability to operate on Kernel level rights. Absolutely not! I don’t understand why people downvote all my replies there, by just stating that companies have reasons from their perspective why they use it. Sorry for my little rant. :D
    
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noobdoomguy8658@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Privileges and rights an application has has little to nothing to do with whether said application will be able to hide from an anti-cheat software or fool it or whatever. It’s more about being able to access different secure parts of the system, like memory, which is where everything lives basically, including game data that the cheats are supposed to manipulate in some advantageous way.

This is what leads many to plea for server-side anti-cheat that doesn’t invade the privacy of the end user (the client).

The games that use kernel anti-cheat are still largely infested with cheaters of many sorts. At this point, defending such deep access sounds like letting some security people live with you, totally at your expense, all the time, even in the bathroom and watching you sleep and masturbate and everything, in the name of safety, because they’ll supposedly be there when some criminal comes to do some crimes, only for them to turn the blind eye when that criminal comes with proper disguise and a gun.

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