alt Hacker NewsWhat are you even talking about?
The parent is right.
I'm quite literally the first person to bash Windows for being a shitty operating system, but the requirement for signed modules puts a massive barrier to entry for cheaters, where Linux can load just about anything.
If every system call can lie to you, there's a few things you can do, but it's not many.
I know this because I've actually done a lot of due diligence on anti-cheat.
One mechanism I attempted to employ was to replay initalisation vectors and determinism of inputs; this means I could replay your session out of band and witness the same outcomes. If there was variation then there's a fault. Except as soon as you introduce floating point numbers there's no more determinism... Oh well.
The other was to watch for "impossible" things, but then you need to run full complex physics simulations for every client. If your game requires you to effectively buy an i7-11700k for every user then you'd have to sell your game for a lot more money, and limit how long they can play - nobody wants this.
The third option was to score our best players and anyone who performs better than that gets their behaviour tracked. The problem is, coming up with a scoring system that's server side is much harder than you think.
GameDevs don't actually like paying a shit load of money for anti-cheat (that also breaks their debugging systems and causes bugs: a wonderful combination)... so if you've got a better way: join the industry and fix it. You'll be a moderately wealthy person.
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If companies have the ability to control the binaries that run on your PC, and prevent you from running the ones you want, you're cooked.
> GameDevs don't actually like paying a shit load of money for anti-cheat (that also breaks their debugging systems and causes bugs: a wonderful combination)... so if you've got a better way: join the industry and fix it. You'll be a moderately wealthy person.
I got a better way... just look at the past. Back in ye goode olde UT2004 times, there was no random matchmaking / ranking bullshit that removed the social element, game licenses cost money, people ran their own servers, and if you pissed off server mods enough, no matter if you were a cheater, a suspected cheater, or just an asshole, your serial got banned - sometimes, across a fleet of servers that shared ban lists. Cheating had costs associated.
But of course, that means you can't lure in whales with free to play games and loot them via microtransactions any more...
What are you talking about?
1 - kernel anti-cheats ARE weaponized by hackers. This is not a matter of discussion unless you are into the AI generated HN news conspiracy.
2 - this linux feature should provide (if I recall properly) a very complex and flexible (not limited to "calls"), and performant, set of interactions between a set of anti-cheat processes and the set of game processes. All that as being non-root priviledge (I think you must be have the same effective user id). The actual and real parameter is the level of competence and creativity of the "anti-cheat" team which is a requirement of any "live-service games" with frequent updates.
3 - for FPS games where aiming skill is critical, anti-cheat are close to useless due to "external" AI based aim assist hardware.
I’ve seen so many cases of cheaters online where even the most braindead of checks would neuter most cheats:
Are they moving faster than conceivably possible by a real player? Even the most basic (x2-x1)/t > twice the theoretical will catch people teleporting or speed hacking.
Is their KDR or any other performance metric outside 5 standard deviations from the mean?
Here’s one: is everyone they encounter reporting them for cheating along with one of the above? Do people leave their matches constantly?
Defining and detecting objectively impossible things is not impossible.