Hacking into Kernel Anti-Cheats: How cheaters bypass Faceit, ESEA and Vanguard anti-cheats

mr_MADAFAKA@lemmy.ml to Linux Gaming@lemmy.ml – 309 points –
Hacking into Kernel Anti-Cheats: How cheaters bypass Faceit, ESEA and Vanguard anti-cheats
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It's frustrating how much trouble people will go to to cheat in a game that's supposed to be fun.

For many people the challenge of breaking it is the fun. Just like lots of very wealthy people who don't have to steal will steal for the fun of it.

Most of the fun for the people breaking anti-cheat is the actual breaking of anti-cheat, not the cheating itself. It's the script kiddies who use the already completed work with little to no effort involved who are doing most of the actual cheating.

Most of the fun for cheat devs (that sell cheats) is the thousands they get off of children and neckbeards paying stupid amounts for their cheats.

Ironically enough, those that sell cheats are more often cheating the cheat devs that wrote the script in the first place, not being able to do so on their own.

Yeah I could see the appeal of breaking the anti-cheat code. But the actual cheaters find the cheats, often pay for them, install what could easily be malware, and take the risk of getting banned for using them. I don't get the appeal.

It's much more frustrating to see "anti cheat" and game developers forcing us to install a bad OS and a rootkit, for the benefit of fewer 10 year olds cheating. How about you develop server side anti cheat, instead of slowing down games by 25%?

Cheats are too sophisticated for that. Server doesn't have enough data. It's getting to the point where even the client might not, by using a 2nd device with image recognition for example.

Server side AC is there to stop people doing actions that are impossible, not to stop possible actions from being automated. Server AC can stop people from moving too quickly, for example. The server knows your position, velocity, and the amount that velocity can change in a tick. It can prevent anything from going above this. It can't tell if you clicked on someone's head really quickly, or accessed memory you shouldn't be allowed to access.

Which, as this video shows, client side AC can't either. So there is absolutely 0 benefit to these invasive solutions, effectively making Server side AC the only sensible solution to game developers who are actually interested in safety (instead of syphoning of user data)

Pretty much every game has server side AC. They aren't mutually exclusive. I'm certain Valorant is varifying data on the server and not accepting any packets a user sends without question.