by jrepinc on 10/30/24, 7:39 PM with 640 comments
by yreg on 10/30/24, 11:18 PM
They had the balls to add a mandatory kernel extension into a game that I've bought 10 years ago and that I wish to play in single player only.
I find it utterly ridiculous. As usual, piracy would have been the superior experience.
by WatchDog on 10/31/24, 3:28 AM
This won’t provide all the same capabilities as cheats that hook into the game process, such as wall hacks, but it would be possible to build a super human aimbot with such an approach.
We already have external “radar” cheats that use the game stereo sound to give the direction that a certain sound(such as footsteps) came from.
by ho_schi on 10/31/24, 9:03 AM
Second step?
Ban games with kernel-level anti-cheat.
It is not acceptable on Linux. Apple will also not accept that shit further, that said Apple lost relevance in gaming with Mantle and the M-Processors (both mean a lot of incompatibility). And Microsoft is regretting every choice in this regard:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24242947/microsoft-window...
But that is a usual pattern. Microsoft makes bad decisions and everyone suffers. Even Linux. Their is a reason why closed-source kernel modules mark Linux as tainted, the system is not trustworthy.
It is the duty of game developers to secure their games themselves. Not manipulating user devices. Forcefully doing stupid and dangerous things because you cannot achieve your task in a safe why is not a reason.
by JohnMakin on 10/31/24, 5:10 PM
I have a dedicated laptop for gaming that I do absolutely nothing else on, not even logging into email accounts. Just steam + games + whatever video software I might need. This is my sane compromise as someone who participates in a lot of competitive games. it sucks, but I see no better solution than to disclose it (insane this wasn't the standard already). Even that is hard, because if you disclose too much, cheaters can take advantage.
by nathants on 10/31/24, 12:14 AM
client inputs have to be trusted, and there is no provenance. the kernel has no visibility of inputs.
i’m shipping a 100 player matchmaking game now. clients tick at 360hz, server ticks at 120hz. fair up to 60 ping, which covers entire continents. servers are metal, not vms. epyc 4244p with 2Gbps egress, 1 server per 15 minute game. mitigations=off and nosmt on all clients and the server.
i love steam, but won’t be releasing this there.
it’s reboot-to-play, a modified archlinux iso that boots directly into the game from a usb drive.
i control not only the kernel, but the os, and every running program. you don’t get cortana. you don’t get discord. you don’t get spotify. you get the game. for the duration of play, your pc becomes an arcade machine.
still, this is not enough.
to play ranked, you’re going to have to get a handcam over your left shoulder. it will see head orientation, both hands, full mousepad, and screen. you’re also going to use fixed mouse speed, mousepad size, and monitor size. reviewing any players inputs will look familiar, since everyone is playing with identical settings and setup.
kernel anticheat is not enough. we need a reproducible full os setup, down to running programs and network connections.
even that is not enough. we need provenance of user inputs hooked right up to the game replay system, so you or anyone can review engagements from any parties perspective.
obviously this should all be opt in. not everyone wants to play ranked, and whole-os anticheat should help even without input provenance.
have you ever wondered if you died to a cheater or a god? do you wish you could never wonder again? i do. soon, i won’t.
by steelframe on 10/31/24, 1:49 AM
by WithinReason on 10/31/24, 9:09 AM
by jolmg on 10/30/24, 8:56 PM
Have anyone seen games that request root privileges?
EDIT: I'm gathering from this[1] and the fact that no wine-related package have kernel modules included and no executable from any of those packages have setuid nor capabilities set, that this isn't really a problem in Linux, just in Windows.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/gjzkzk/will_w...
by nithssh on 10/31/24, 1:12 PM
by lousken on 10/30/24, 8:19 PM
by fngjdflmdflg on 10/30/24, 10:52 PM
by wiz21c on 10/31/24, 7:58 AM
Add UEFI on your PC and DRM in your browser.
And next, your governement will ask you to add its anti pedo-pornography tools.
And then we have a new episode of Black Mirror...
by bunderbunder on 10/31/24, 4:22 PM
What if online games track how well people do and sort them into tiers based on skill level? And then put people who are roughly evenly matched together. I am guessing that cheaters will naturally end up clumping together with each other, and maybe a smattering of elite players who are good enough that they can hold their own, and maybe even benefit from the added challenge. And also, casual and less-skilled players can play together and not get dominated so much.
I don't think it would end cheating. But perhaps it would mitigate it by reducing a lot of the potential upside. Assuming the upside for many cheaters is that they enjoy feeling like they can dominate a server full of non-cheaters.
by imchillyb on 10/31/24, 4:40 AM
This is the war. It's always been the war. It will always be the war. Digital changed the medium but war, war never changes.
The war in unwinnable in any real sense of the word win. However, security does not need to be impenetrable security only needs to dissuade the attacker.
Kernel level, blah-blah-blah, doesn't dissuade cheaters. Those things dissuade legitimate users. It's never the ideology that dissuades those users though as they don't know or care. What dissuades these users are the difficulties that these systems present to the uninformed user.
The typical end user doesn't know how to 'fix-it' when things go wrong. PC vendors won't support the issue. The game publisher won't support the issue. The game developer rarely supports the issue. Kernel level blah-blah-blah causes a blah-blah-blah. Nobody wants to hear it. Nobody wants to fix it.
And, to top off this defecation-confection, the user is left with software that they paid for and cannot use or access. No refunds. Sorry. And, and, and!!! There are still cheaters on the platform. Every platform. There's your f'n cherry.
This is bad for the entire industry.
by Terr_ on 10/30/24, 11:48 PM
1. More games are trying to cut costs with ad-hoc P2P servers, meaning that sometimes important logic is occurring on a not-so-trusted machine.
2. More games are using a revenue model which may be threatened by consumer-side tinkering.
For example, imagine a cooperative game that uses a P2P server, and the host has done something to make it much easier for the squad to get a drop of the Super Special Loot (#1) and the rarity of the loot through gameplay drives many players to purchase it though an in-game store.
by andrewmcwatters on 10/30/24, 9:59 PM
This whole thing anti-cheat thing is just a separate problem entirely, but it's so painfully exacerbated by the first.
by juliangmp on 10/31/24, 7:40 AM
by dang on 10/31/24, 4:10 AM
Why anti-cheat software utilizes kernel drivers (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42001030 - Oct 2024 (50 comments)
by mattigames on 10/30/24, 8:40 PM
by dbrueck on 10/30/24, 10:57 PM
- you are a tiny minority and not the target customer
- online multiplayer games are an absurdly big business (i.e. there are huge incentives here)
- no, you can't completely solve this server side
- elite players are insanely good - they are by definition outliers, so looking for statistical outliers is not in itself a solution
- game companies are highly incentivized to work with (or at least not antagonize) the elite players (so just throwing them in matches with cheaters is not a solution)
- the stakes are high both for the devs and their users, so "pretty good" anti-cheat is usually insufficient
I hope to see more discussion on possible solutions and tradeoffs - this is a challenging technical problem whose solution (if there is one) is fairly valuable.
[edit: hopefully fixed the tone, per feedback]
by supportengineer on 10/30/24, 10:24 PM
by Kapura on 10/31/24, 4:57 PM
Ultimately, I sympathize with game developers trying to create a good, _consistent_ experience for players across multiplayer titles. The reason players accept anticheat software in large mp games is because the alternative is worse.
by 0cf8612b2e1e on 10/30/24, 8:37 PM
Why should I ever trust a gaming company to take security seriously? There was a story a few years ago about how one guy at home debugged GTA5’s atrocious loading times without any resources. Loading times which were notoriously bad and surely had a negative impact on revenue, yet nobody in the company could be bothered.
*Never verified it, but I recall the new owners of Kernel Space Program were accused of reporting personal data files to the cloud.
by LinuxBender on 10/30/24, 11:19 PM
Related to this it may be worth installing something that does checksum snapshots of the filesystems to see if a game has tampered with system files. OSSEC, chkrootkit or even a cron job that just does this manually and runs diffs. While some package managers have this functionality they will usually ignore files outside of the package manifest that may get picked up by the system. Immutable off-system backups are of course good too.
# do not put in /etc/sysctl.conf, instead use a startup script or a script that is run prior to starting Steam.
sysctl -w "kernel.modules_disabled=1"
sysctl -w "kernel.kexec_load_disabled=1"
by butterfly42069 on 10/30/24, 8:49 PM
by Topfi on 10/30/24, 9:26 PM
by AdmiralAsshat on 10/30/24, 8:46 PM
by pjmlp on 10/30/24, 9:57 PM
by donatj on 10/31/24, 4:08 PM
by insane_dreamer on 10/31/24, 4:37 PM
by two_handfuls on 10/31/24, 12:20 AM
by agentultra on 10/30/24, 11:07 PM
by m463 on 10/31/24, 2:32 AM
by bigstrat2003 on 10/30/24, 9:29 PM
And if that means more companies choose to avoid kernel anti-cheat, so much the better. I'm still mad that I can't play Helldivers 2 - a freaking co-op game where cheaters can't pose a problem - because of this nonsense.
by gnuser on 10/31/24, 3:55 PM
Wanna hear my conspiracy theory?
Three letter agencies are using games as an intel gathering tool, and KLA is part of that. What if the CEOs are getting NSLs, etc?
by bastard_op on 10/30/24, 10:16 PM
Valve knows this, kernel-level anti-cheat is simply not practical for use with Linux as a consideration. Most game companies care zero for Linux in the first place, which means for us, we just end up inadvertently boycotting those games and bad-mouthing them regardless, but hey, it's only 1%.
by throwaway48476 on 10/30/24, 8:13 PM
Games publishers have been bad actors in this space for a long time now. The genshin impact anticheat was used in a malware campaign. Rockstar was very misleading trying to imply their kernel driver not being compatible with the steam deck was valves fault.