alt Hacker NewsNever forget the risks of trusting game companies with this sort of access to your machine.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/fs-labs-flight-simulator-pas...
Company decides to "catch pirates" as though it was police. Ships a browser stealer to consumers and exfiltrates data via unencrypted channels.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1cibw9r/valorant...
https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/634974-...
Covertly screenshots your screen and sends the image to their servers.
https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...
https://twitter.com/TheWack0lian/status/779397840762245124
https://fuzzysecurity.com/tutorials/28.html
https://github.com/FuzzySecurity/Capcom-Rootkit
Yes, a literal privilege escalation as a service "anticheat" driver.
Trusting these companies is insane.
Every video game you install is untrusted proprietary software that assumes you are a potential cheater and criminal. They are pretty much guaranteed to act adversarially to you. Video games should be sandboxed and virtualized to the fullest possible extent so that they can access nothing on the real system and ideally not even be able to touch each other. We really don't need kernel level anticheat complaining about virtualization.
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And if we embraced instead of feared remote attestation and secure enclaves, the days of game companies having this level of access would come to an end.
Game compagny have to have those kernel anti cheat because MS never implemented proper isolation in the first place, if Windows was secured like an apple phone or a console there wouldn't be a need for it.
Anti cheat don't run on modern console, game dev knoes that the latest firmware on a console is secure enough so that the console can't be tempered.
The privacy points in general are valid, but what irritates me is using this rationale against kernel mode anti cheats specifically.
You do not need kernel access to make spyware that takes screenshots. You do not need a privileged service to read the user’s browser history.
You can do all of this, completely unprivileged on Windows. People always seem to conflate kernel access with privacy which is completely false. It would in fact be much harder to do any of these things from kernel mode.